ffxii - a kind of integrity, cont.
Balthier curses, pulling the Strahl into a steep, near-vertical climb, though the bird’s claws hook quite well in the grated floor and it still nearly reaches the chair, beak snapping less than a foot from his head before it finally slips, tumbling backward with a garbled cry, a feathered boulder rolling to the aft of the ship and it is only the barest of temporary solutions.
“Well?” Balthier says, leveling out, eyes flicking to the instruments - he maneuvers through the Jagd on some combination of instinct and memory, not the sort of thing that needs testing by homicidal chocobos, though that does not explain exactly why he is looking at her.
“Yes?”
“I thought your people were good with animals?”
“Good enough to know when they do not wish to listen.”
Humes have all kinds of misconceptions about viera powers, though it’s obviously more wishful thinking on Balthier’s part than anything. Behind them in the corridor, she can hear a screech, the ruffling of feathers as the bird rights itself. The moogles have reappeared and are shoving at the furniture, swiftly unscrewing panels from the walls, all but taking the inside of the Strahl apart as they attempt to construct a makeshift barricade between the cockpit and the unholy terror that has once again found its feet.
It is a contest of speed between the engineers and the bird, the moogles unhinging a door only to bolt it into place across the end of the hall, dodging the snapping beak as they work, Balthier grimacing at the sound of his lovely ship undergoing a rather unexpected transformation - and then the ship hits a pocket of dead air and Fran nearly slams against the ship’s front window as they plummet out of the sky. The bird and the moogles and everything that hasn’t been tied down hangs momentarily weightless in midair, Balthier cursing sharply above the warning scream of the instruments as he throws his entire body against the column to turn it. The Strahl lurches drunkenly from one side to the other, finally straining skyward as the engine splutters and the glossair rings regain their equilibrium. Fran slowly straightens up from where she’d been clinging to the back of her chair, watching the moogles pick themselves up off the ground - and with a hollow, metallic clang, the chocobo spits a doorknob over the barricade and across the deck to land at her feet.
“Open the rear hatch, Fran.”
“That bird is worth more than the both of us together.” She reminds him, and for the moment Balthier is too busy steering to argue, the controls trembling wildly in his hands. The cause of all this insanity is still glaring, bright eyed at them, letting out a near-constant series of angry warks and chirps and trills, scrambling to its feet only to tumble again at another of Balthier’s mad maneuvers.
“You’re lucky it’s not me you’re dealing with, my friend,” Balthier calls out, the ship finally leveling out in a moment of calm skies, though Fran swears she can feel the subtle sway, left and right, as they move around pockets of dangerous nothingness within the mist, “If Fran were not the voice of reason - wait, is that /my/ doorknob?”
He looks back, just long enough to see that the moogles have in fact used the door of his quarters as their last line of defense, and as if the bird has followed along with his train of thought, it shuffles back a few steps and dives into his room.
“Did it just- by every god that ever was, get it out! Get it out of there!”
Balthier flails impotently with one hand, unable to leave the controls, while the moogles stare back, not about to risk their own fur for his troubles. The ship lurches again, and Balthier is forced to shift his full attention once again to flying. All his focus save the part of him making a low, whining sound to accompany the ripping of fabric, the sound of glass shattering as anything in his quarters that can be destroyed is quickly rent to shreds by vengeful claws. Balthier flinches with each new sound, as if silently adding up the cost, and for all that Fran is fond of him, she is more fond of remaining in one piece, no one willing to do more than listen to the chaos slowly taper off.
“Shoot it.”
“Balthier.”
“Then shoot /me/.”
A horrible sound from the hall, as if someone’s shoved a whole pot roast into the external Mist intake valve, and a slime-covered projectile hurls past them, bouncing off the windshield and leaving a sickly green smear behind. At one point, it had been a boot. The left of Balthier’s favorite set, if Fran had to hazard a guess. The bird stares at them a moment, feathers ruffling, and returns to what remains of Balthier’s room.
“Ah, no. Shooting’s a waste of a perfectly good bird,” he laughs roughly, grinning like a madman, “we’re going to /eat/ it.”
A harsh shriek cuts through the low static of the open com, Jagd patches doing little better for the radio than they do for the ships. The reason they haven’t been paying too much attention to the skies, until the Rozarrian cruiser slips in behind them.
“Hailing the unmarked ship and her crew! You are traveling in restricted Rozarrian airspace. Identify yourselves or you will be shot down!”
Fran is already throwing herself into her seat, Balthier’s hands tightening on the controls, promising yet another memorable escape. The chocobo lets out another furious sound from inside the cabin, kicking something no doubt expensive hard enough to dent the wall.
“At least /someone’s/ enjoying themselves.” He says blithely, and tilts the ship into a dive so sharp it might as well be free-fall.
----------------
In the end it is a bit of a debacle, though not without some gain. Balthier spends what little time there is in between dodging their pursuit pondering how best a chocobo might be plucked, stuffed and roasted, and whether Fran might prefer chestnut stuffing or plain. The Rozarrians are ulitmately scuttled among the Jagd, their ship damaged but not destroyed. Fran still does not envy them the long march home. The chocobo is delivered unharmed and uneaten to its final destination, and the egg that it leaves behind in the nest of what had been Balthier’s best shirts pays back for the damages to everything but his pride. Fran watches the moogles briskly establish a new set of wagers, should the situation ever repeat itself, though Balthier shies away from larger cargo in the months that follow, and it is a considerable amount of time before he stops comparing every new bauble to some far superior item lost forever in a chocobo’s gullet.
Life goes on, through eastern Archades and Balfonheim, down past Dalmasca and back up through Nabudis, until even places she’s never lived become familiar. The word Nethicite flickers in and out of the world like a wandering ghost, growing rumor and speculation turning up in this port and that. If Fran had not been there, the night Balthier became a stranger, perhaps she would not even take notice of it, or how Balthier seems keep track of every new piece of information. Still spending much of his time on matters of high myth, what humes consider the earliest days of their history - Raithwall, the Sun Cryst, the Midlight Shard. He speaks to her of none of of his findings, or the purpose behind his interest. Fran has thought to ask him, but there is a sadness in Balthier’s eyes when he is lost in those contemplations, a desolation that always keeps her silent.
Fortunately, they are but brief mentions, scattered and forgotten amidst better days. Adventures that often end with the sun slipping beneath the horizon, the two of them riding tandem, Fran’s legs tucked up against Balthier’s, leaning against his back, arms around his waist as he flies whatever has caught his fancy long enough to steal it away. He smells of sun-warmed leather and hume and though Fran has never regretted her choice to leave Eryut, she finds she is more now than simply satisfied, more than contentment. Balthier makes her happy - the kind of happiness she knows now that she’d been hoping to discover, what she’d left the Wood for, not even knowing if it existed or how she might find it.
The night comes, then, when they have had yet another successful adventure and a bit too much wine, and when Balthier’s arm snakes around her waist, it is entirely in camaraderie, simply one drunken friend propping up another. Fran wonders why that is what finally tips the balance, knowing his touch is completely innocent, to convince her of what she has been pondering ever since that night when the thought of bedding her made him blush and look away.
When they arrive at the Strahl, Fran nudges him gently to one side, up against the hull, and before Balthier can quite right himself, assuming she’d simply bumped into him, she lifts a hand to his cheek, leaning in and kisses him deeply. Balthier tenses under her touch, and she draws away to see a look of surprise and dumb shock that is far more pleasing to her than his usual smooth chivalry, though his hands do slide up against her arms, a tentative, questioning sort of caress. Slowly, his fingertips catch beneath the edges of her sleeves, sliding down to trace the curves of her arm guards with amusing trepidation.
“…Fran?”
“Balthier.” Fran smirks, and leans in for another kiss, though his hands tighten on her arms just before she can reach his mouth again.
“I… this… I mean, you are certain?”
As if she does not know her mind. Fran smiles against his lips, kisses him once, and twice - and then he is finally kissing her back, though there is little in it that speaks to the carefree pirate, the charming rogue. He touches her the way he holds the rarest scrolls, the most ancient tomes, care and reverence and what may even be a little awe. So serious, and she is surprised and pleased that it is her turn to play the fool, to have her way with this delightful hume. Balthier. Her Balthier, and Fran is a siren of a strange, cloud-strewn sea, this handsome sailor gathered up in her charms.
He looks young in the dark, his eyes wide when she draws herself up over him, and his hands are not so sure and his mouth is not so clever. At first.
The morning finds them drowsing together, her leg thrown over his, tucked cozy against his side, one of his hands tangled in her hair, the other lightly stroking the top of her thigh. Such laziness is not, she knows, a luxury Balthier can always indulge in, often arriving on the Strahl in some varying state of half-dressed shambles. Usually sporting some evidence of leaping out a window, or otherwise dodging the startled fury of some unsuspecting brother, father or paramour. The shirt he left crumpled near the door is half-embroidered, pretty enough that it appears to be a deliberate asymmetry, but Fran knows that the girl was only half-finished with the gift when her husband had come home early to find a naked pirate in his marriage bed.
It is the first opportunity Fran has had to study Balthier’s own quarters, little privacy to be had aboard ship and no need, until she had been so pleasantly invited, to intrude upon it. She recognizes various baubles and trinkets from jobs they have done, items he has yet to fence or preferred to keep, and random gifts received, all piled haphazardly around the room. Some of them are stacked high enough to nearly touch the various holstered weapons and mechanics’ tools that dangle down from the ceiling, tossed over the crossbeams. He has a considerable number of scrolls, and even more books, also piled on any surface that might hold the weight. A large map of Ivalice covers much of the wall opposite the bed, with smaller pictures tacked here and there upon it, and what looks like hand-written notes on top of those, scribbled out on scraps of parchment. Worthy of a closer look, though for the moment Fran is feeling warm and lazy and prefers to examine Balthier instead, tracing the scar on his collarbone, the star-shaped mark she’d noticed the first that they’d met. Balthier smiles when he notices her attention.
“It does give the girls something to aim for.”
As if it had not been her own mouth mapping those marks the night before, feeling him arch and groan at the brush of her tongue, the gentle scraping of her claws. His fingertips stroke the fur at her throat with no small care, and she sighs, rolling onto her back as she stretches, enjoying the feel of his warm hand sliding across her stomach.
”Fran, you are every word any poet ever wrote about beauty.”
“You said that about the last upgrade for the Strahl.”
“Did I now?” He smiles, and then it fades as looks into her eyes, and away. “I, this, you and I… it’s not that I don’t…”
“You will be out chasing hume girls before the sun has set, Balthier,” she says, and puts a finger to his lips before he can protest, “and I would have it so. I will not have this be a chain between us, for you or I.”
Balthier takes her hand, pulls it away from his mouth only to bring her knuckles back to his lips in the formal kiss of a gentleman.
“Yet I fear you will ever be first in my heart.”
It is pure pirate, a knave’s seduction, but this is Balthier, and as Fran draws him in for a less polite kiss, she knows he is entirely in earnest. She also wonders what bets the moogles have been making over this.
“Fran,” he murmurs when they part again, staring into her eyes once more. So earnest, her lovely hume, and more serious than she had ever thought possible. “If I… you must know that, whatever happens, the Strahl will be yours. Always, until you no longer have need of her.”
It is near to what he’d said, when he’d brought her aboard, but this is not that. It is far more intimate than even being together now, her body against his, faces a bare handsbreath apart - he is leaving her the airship should he fall to some ill fate, as the bow she carries had been handed down to her, its former owner long past hunting, a final gift before she’d gone to walk the next path. The only feeling more profound than her amazement at his gesture is the fear for why Balthier might choose to make it.
--------------
As Fran waits for the Archadian solider to arrest her, she ponders blaming Balthier for turning her perilously soft-hearted, but cannot claim it true. Seized by a ridiculous impulse, that much was sure, but the hume thief had been little more than a child, and so terrified when Fran had stumbled over him that he’d tripped the alarm in his nervousness. The punishment would be far greater for him than for herself, were he caught, and so Fran had let him run, had taken the treasure and gone in the opposite direction, what would insure his escape at the cost of her own. Now, it will simply be a matter of breaking free of her captors and finding another way out, hopefully before Balthier decides to move on. It has been no small time they have been partners, but she has never done anything quite so foolish before, and cannot truly expect him to wait for her. No doubt Balthier will expect that she can find him again just as easily in some other port, though it will be annoying to do so, and he will tease her for it.
It had been an obvious lure to any enterprising pirate - the ‘Fall of Landis’, a set of gemstones that had formerly been a part of the republic’s royal jewels, torn from their settings and scattered like the pride of that former republic, being shipped through a small Archadian port, on their way to some private owner in the north. Fran wondered, as she listened to the sound of armored footsteps hurrying to meet her, if the boy had been the son of some former duke or knight, had come up with his slapdash plan as a way to win back some lost honor for a homeland he had never known. It is not her history, she sees little but gil to be had, but even if she knew the whole of it Fran would not think them a proper trade for a boy’s life. A handful of stones that could carry the weight of a world within their facets - and for a moment she is not thinking of Landis at all.
A single soldier finally charges around the corner, only to come to an abrupt halt at the sight of her, and Fran knows that despite the cost in pride it is the right decision to stay. The boy may have been killed on the spot - Archadian law allows Judges to pass swift sentences for thieves - but she is a viera, not at all who the guard expected to find, and as he stares Fran straightens up to her full hight, giving him her best imperious gaze. When he does not move, she holds out the bag of gems, listening to more clanking down the hall - the men who may have been looking for the boy now focused on her. If she knew the child had yet escaped… but now that she is here, and it is clear these men are loathe to attack, she may as well give him all the time she can.
The guard raises his sword in what seems to be a vaguely threatening motion, though perhaps hoping she won’t call him on it, and gingerly takes the bag from her. The other guards have halted a good distance away, unwilling to come any closer. Perhaps they have never seen one of her kind before. Fran keeps her expression cold and impassive, though it is difficult not to smile at the sound of metal plates shifting in nervous confusion.
“I… ah…. you’ll - you’ll have to come with me.”
It is a question, not an order, and Fran is half-tempted to say no, just to see what he’ll do. Instead, she nods, and follows the guard out of the treasury vaults and through a maze of corridors, into the guardhouse proper. The other soldiers peel away well before they arrive at the guard captain’s station, not at all wanting to be involved in this, and before long he and Fran arrive in front of a nondescript desk and an equally nondescript man, who looks from Fran to the soldier and back again, and seems in no hurry to hand out medals for valor.
“What have you done?”
“I caught this… uh her, Sir. Er, she was attempting to steal the… um… valuables. From the vault. Sir.”
The guard captain looks at Fran again, and she returns his gaze with serene indifference.
“Does she speak?”
“I don’t… believe so?”
A glance at her, one eyebrow raised, but Fran sees no reason to respond. Instead, she lifts her gaze to the edge of the wall, a small window, the wooden beams of the ceiling. It is a sturdy building, not particularly new or well-constructed, and if the cells are at all similar it should not be so impossible to escape.
“You’ve brought me a viera, soldier. You know that, don’t you?”
“Sir.”
“A viera who is not an Archadian citizen. Or /anywhere else/, as far as I’m aware. What do you suggest we do with her?”
Maybe Fran will not even have to plan her escape. The guard captain might be amenable to simply closing his eyes as long as she agrees not to be there when he opens them.
“So we - I mean, sir, there are still - we can’t have… people… and such just breaking the rules. What about moogle law?”
“Does that look like a moogle to you?” The guard captain sighs. “You just /had/ to bring her back to me. Put her in a cell for now. I’ll… consider our options.”