FFXII Fic: Of Pirates and Plottings, Part 2 (Larsa/Penelo/Vaan)
It was either post this up or go write some emo poetry over being incredibly depressed. I think everyone here can agree that this was by far the better option.
In any case, this series is still for the luminous artemischan and for wonderful threewalls, who beta’d the hell out of this and helped salvage the original sprawling mess I served up to her. And my apologies ahead of time to the outrageously talented mithrigil. I guess you can think of Larsa’s way of “getting” the girl here as a sort of, er, homage? ;)
And as always, comments and questions are very much appreciated! This is probably the last long story I’ll ever write and I’d love to know whether or not it’s working for everyone! ♥
Title: Of Pirates and Plottings (Part 2/3) [ Part 1] & [ Part 3]
Fandom: Final Fantasy XII
Series: The Uses of Enchantment
Characters/Pairings: Vaan, Larsa/Penelo, Larsa/Penelo/Vaan (Despite all of Vaan's protests to the contrary!)
Rating: R, strong language, sexual situations
Summary: Even someone stuck in the margins of a fairy tale can spin an interesting story.
*
In the end, strangely enough, Vaan arrived at his destination just as his evil twin left, even managing to get a glimpse of her as she had gone. There had been flowers in her hands and new ribbons in her hair and the kind of shy, almost girlish smile that Vaan could have sworn she’d stop being able to give around men sometime around when Balthier had passed on.
It reminded him, almost, of the way Penelo had been around Vaan‘s brother, of all the little things she had done to get his sibling’s attention, of the sort of glow that had always come around her when she had been fourteen years old and trying to be as graceful as possible whenever Reks had been around.
He missed that girl, Vaan had to admit. And he had thought she’d gone completely or just been buried forever, underneath all the armor Penelo always tried to put on. But she was there and somehow, Larsa seemed to have some strange way of constantly resurrecting her.
And more than anything, that was probably why Vaan stopped hiding in the curtains and made his way to Larsa, watching his friend watch his partner as she made her way out.
“She almost looks harmless like that,” Vaan whispered almost into the emperor‘s ear, “doesn’t she?”
To Larsa’s credit, he didn’t even flinch, just stood up straighter than ever and opened his eyes even wider, as though to get one last glimpse of Penelo before she turned around a corner and vanished from his sight. “Perhaps another man more ignorant of her peculiar brand of precision might find that to be the case. But we both know her well enough to know that she’s most dangerous when she looks most at ease, correct?”
“Hell yeah,” Vaan agreed, laughing. “I once saw her almost disembowel a man with a pen knife when she was pretending to be a harem girl and he called her sugar thighs one too many times.” And at Larsa’s wide eyes, he had to grin. “And the nickname stuck, which was the funny thing. Even if she bitch about having Turkish delights in her jumpsuits for a few weeks afterwards.”
“Oh,” Larsa said, and smiled slightly, incredibly forked eyebrows rearing up. “I was wondering why the privateers in my realm kept insisting on calling her the Dread Pirate Sugar Thighs for the last few months I spent watching out for her. I knew there had to be a story but it simply wasn‘t one I could yet tease out.”
Now this… this was something both new and old, something Vaan had always suspected but never had evidence of till now. “So that means that you really are trailing the two of us after all?"
"Not quite," his old friend demurely corrected. "I've been merely watching out for her. That you were often on the scene as her partner and accessory was merely a very... interesting fallout."
"Huh," Vaan said, and wondered if he ought to get upset. But then... that would explain just the sort of strange deus ex machinas that had often served to get Penelo and him out of ass-reams of trouble whenever they bit off more than they chewed which was, Vaan had to admit, sort of terribly often. He didn‘t worry enough and Penelo usually worried too much and that was sort of a guaranteed recipe for disaster on some of their more outrageous schemes. "I don't really mind, since that probably saved our rear plenty of times but... er... you do realize that Penelo'd probably kick your ass a little for thinking she's a pushover if she ever found out?"
That startled a laugh out of Larsa. "Very much so. And having seen her on the battle field in years past, I have no doubt that she'd be able to carry out that task with complete ease. But," and here his mouth softened, turned to lines it still startled Vaan to see an Archadian could keep, "even the possibility of dire punishment seems worth it to keep her safe."
"Yeah," Vaan said softly. "She can sometimes make you feel that way, can't she?"
Larsa inclined his head in what Vaan took be a sort of yes. “Perhaps we could sit down and share a few bottles of wine and talk this all over?”
And after eyeing said bottles already scattered thoroughly from Penelo‘s last visit, Vaan shrugged. “Oh what the hell, I’m already here and I’m pretty sure she likes me too much to main me permanently. Why the hell not?”
*
And though Vaan knew Penelo really might maim him permanently if she ever found out, he ended up staying up almost the whole night with Larsa, speaking about damn near anything and everything, and whatever floated through their mind.
They talked about Penelo, of course: what she liked and what she did and how she was getting along now. Larsa let him ramble on and on about her weird little habits and all her strange little routines, like why she always wanted people around her to have clean fingernails (“She always said she couldn’t stand dirt under there, reminded her too much of the last time she saw her brothers”) and went about making decisions in the worst ways possible (“She decides just where we should go at the last minute then yelling at me when we're the last ones on the scene!") and how she always took a stupidly long time in the shower ("And she carols within the tub too on occasion, yes?" "Oh, you poor bastard. Did she make you stand outside and listen to her singing because you didn't like her cooking either?" "No, that was not… precisely how it played out…")
But they talked about other things too, things even Vaan found himself surprised to be speaking of. Politics, for half an hour, and Vaan was pleased to know that though he couldn’t really match Larsa’s mind there-- not that that was much of a surprise-- at least he knew enough about the way Balfonheim worked to get around Archadia to surprise Larsa into being a little alarmed. And after politics, they had turned to sports and childhoods, how they’d grown up, and the parents they’d had, and the lessons they’d learned and the games they had played and just who they‘d played those games with--and learning that Larsa’s main playmates had been the gigantic armored thugs of the empire just explained so damn much.
And brothers as well, since having ones that screwed them over but good seemed to be the one thing they had in common, besides being driven mad (though in totally different ways) by a certain braided somebody.
Brothers as well-- and for the first time in years, Vaan had talked about Reks, about how he had run off to fight and came home and died and left him with nothing, almost nothing, besides a friend whose heart he had almost broken completely. And Larsa talked too, with a half-drained cup of wine in his hand and a voice almost indistinct to the point of sounding coarse, about his brother as well, and his father, and all that they'd left him in turn.
"An emblem," Larsa said, gestures towards his chest with his hand, fingers arching towards nothing and everything. "A mantle. A duty. A responsibility. They wanted my life and my years and my blood. And I‘ll sacrifice them as well, when they need me to. And the only thing I’ve ever wanted in recompense for all of that, for sacrificing everything, is and has always been her."
Sometimes, Vaan knew, it was best to be quiet, to see the strangest of moments play out.
"I love her," Larsa said, and his eyes when they turned to Vaan's looked faintly desperate, a little pathetic, and more sad than Vaan could ever remember them being before. But then, he wouldn’t really know anyway. It hadn't been him who had been with Larsa when his brother had died, when he had become emperor, when he had faced a future without a father or a brother or a mentor or a guardian proper, with all the world before him and a place that left him no way out.
It had always been Penelo who had stood by Larsa during all those times. And maybe that was why Larsa was whispering to Vaan just what he was right now.
"I love her," the Emperor said again, and his words were simple and clear and honest and calm, as though they meant everything and couldn‘t be dammed up. "And I love her and I love her and I love her and I love her and even if I could find a way to do so, I wouldn’t stop. I want to live with her and I want to die with her and I want to everything with her for all the rest of my life. And for once, all I want is for her to look at me and not look away and pretend she doesn’t see what must be apparent even to her biased eyes.”
"And," Vaan said, and can barely believe he was saying it. "And so you want me to... to what? Help you? Point you? Tell you what to do to get her to actually pay attention to you, instead of ignoring you like she likes to ignore everything she doesn‘t know if she wants?"
"Yes," his old friend said, mouth curving up into a funny little smile. "If you’ve any suggestions on how to circumvent that eventuality, I’d much prefer hearing it now."
Vaan had to sigh at what he was asking. "Hell, you know how stubborn Penelo can be when she's made up her mind about something. It’s not like she’s a lock you can just pick-- you’ve got to really goddamn work on her when she thinks she’s got something figured out. And… and… and what the hell, I’m a pirate! What would I even get out of stepping into this mess anyways?!”
"Anything you want," Larsa said quietly. "Anything you need. I've an entire empire at my disposal and you may plunder from it freely. Take whatever you would like or desire."
Somehow, Vaan had a feeling that’d end up being his answer. And it was tempting as hell, god only knew, but that wasn’t what he’d come here for right now.
"And what if," he finally said softly, "I want to see her happy? Do you think you could promise me that much?"
The smile that broke over Larsa's face at that was almost painful to look at, like staring into the sun during an eclipse that covered over everything. "I can do that, I believe. I would try with all my heart."
And as far as Vaan is concerned... that was really enough for now..
"Take care of her," Vaan finally said, knowing that everything else he needed to know, he had sort of figured out ahead of time. "I’ll help but as much as I can but, hell, if you break your promise, I might have to kill you. I might have to kill you an awful lot.”
For a minute, the Emperor of all of the grandest empire in all of Ivalice paused. And when he finally answered, he did it through a smile that made him seem almost like the young boy Vaan had known in years that had already left them behind so swiftly.
And maybe, Vaan thought, that was just why Penelo seemed to love him more and more every time he was in her sight.
"You needn't worry on that account," Larsa says softly. "I could never bring myself to do otherwise. And, if anything, it’s always been she who’s taken best care of me and kept me from troubles I’d otherwise find."
*
It's just the same for me, buddy, Vaan thought as he slowly made his way back home, back to Penelo, back to the little airship that had been their home for almost five years and had at most maybe another five to serve the both of them.
It’s just the same for me. And now I’m just trying to make it all up.
*
And so he had found little ways to help them both as the months had gone by and Penelo had opened her eyes little by little to what had always been hiding in plain sight.
He owed them both, frankly speaking. Larsa, because Vaan knew he hadn’t done enough to help him in the first place, always trusting that something would turn up, always trusting that somehow Larsa would find his way despite everything against him in the world, just because he’d been born with a silver spoon in his mouth and Vaan had assumed that just because of that, it didn’t matter what else hit him in his life.
And Penelo because-- well. Just because. Even if it meant losing a little bit of her, night by night by night.
Not that it felt that way most of the time. Because she was still very much Vaan's partner, very much his best friend, and very much the same crazy flirt she'd always been since she had turned thirteen and finally had some actual curves on her body. She was Vaan's main accessory in crime, still the backseat driver to his front seat psychopath and still the one who bullied him relentlessly into actually planning things once in a while. She still refused to laugh at his best dirty jokes and still used up all the hot water in their ship for her never-ending showers and still dragged the most interesting men (and occasionally Aeguls) back to her bunk and did the most incredibly noisy things with them that Vaan had to retaliate against with any stray viera he can lure back on his own.
She was still his partner and she was still the Penelo he had known and sometimes, it almost felt like nothing could ever change the life they'd grown accustomed to. And sometimes, Vaan even found himself wishing that was the case.
But things were changing and Vaan could chart them just as easily as he learned to encourage her trips to the north and needle her about just what she did there and piss her off by talking about just how much tail Larsa must have gotten by this time.
Things were changing, they really were, especially with Penelo spending more and more of her free time in Archades, whose emperor had apparently taken to leaving his throne with mysterious fevers for days at a time. Things were changing and Vaan could read it as easily as he could see how more and more of Penelo’s men had turned into androgynous pretty boys with dark hair and scrawny limbs and large, light colored eyes.
Vaan knew better than to ask though and contented himself with simply rolling his eyes and saying a few scattered prayers for the two stupidest and love-sick dopes he had ever known in his life.
And one day, Penelo came back to their ship and looked at Vaan and told him that she had found herself kissing Larsa for the first time. And even if Vaan had thought about this ahead of time, he knew that he wouldn't have been able to predict the way she'd look afterwards-- flushed but trembling, pale but bright, incandescent with happiness but almost scared right out of her mind.
"What the hell was I even thinking?" she asked, and there were no tears in her eyes but her hand were trembling. "And now just what the bloody hell am I supposed to now do?"
*
They talked for much of the rest of the night and in an odd way, it wasn’t all that different from being with Larsa-- albeit a Larsa that wasn’t afraid to aim below the belt when Vaan asked if the person who had tried to kiss her was maybe just suffering from really poor eyesight. And because he knew that nothing was probably better for these kinds of things than a good couple of shots of whiskey, he had even benevolently dug into his emergency stash when she had inevitably ran out of the Rozarrian rum that she so liked.
"And the thing is," Penelo said, somewhere in between her fourth drink and her ninth, "is that I don't even know why he likes me. I really don't! I mean, he's like--" and she wiggled her fingers into the air around her head desperately, "--and I'm like--" and she sort of swayed them around her midsection right now "--y'know what I’m talking about, right?”
"Not really," Vaan had to admit. "And I don’t know why you always have to make things so jumbled up anyway. You like him. He’s been hot for you since before his voice broke. What the hell’s the problem anyway? What’s keeping you from making a real man out of him anyway?”
Right now, Penelo looked rather as though she was thinking of regurgitating everything she had already taken in for the night. "First off, let’s not even get into the whole puberty thing, Vaan. It’s weird enough that he’s younger than me-- I don’t need to think of what he was like before he even grew out of his cute little booties. And if you--” Suddenly she looked rather thunder-struck. “If you figured this all out, who else might have done it too?!”
Vaan tried to shrug as innocently as possible and not let it on that pretty much everyone who had ever seen the two of them together, ever, probably had some idea. “No clue, just like always. And anyway, does it even matter? Again, you like him. He likes you. What’s keeping you from doing all these incredibly gross things that I don’t even want to think about with each other?”
And now Penelo was biting her lip and looking down with a flush on her face that Vaan just knew meant that she wanted something very, very badly indeed but was too stupid to actually go after it because of her conscience or something equally dumb. “Because it’s not just about what I want… it’s about what’s good for the both of us in the future. And… c’mon, Vaan, goofy ideas about the power of love aside, he’s an emperor and I’m… hell, I’m not exactly empress material, am I? Even if I liked him, I’d have to be goofier than you around a gaggle of vieras to think we'd ever be able to make it in the long rung.”
“But do you want him in the future?” Vaan asked, curious almost despite himself. “I mean, you never shut up about him and you’re always going off to see him and the last time I came to Archades, you sure as hell were touching him an awful lot…”
She glared at Vaan for that but it was a pretty lazy glare in her arsenal of stares, the sort of glare that was about as internally paralyzing as a pat on the back. Vaan just stared blankly back, using the power of obliviousness to shield him like always, and she gave in after a moment. Playing dumb-- or at least dumber-- really was a good idea sometimes.
"It's not that I don't want to find out what it'd be like," she finally admitted, and in vino there really was veritas. "Because sometimes-- hell, a lot of the times-- he’s just so cute and so sweet and so friendly and so... so... so... so goddamn fuckable, until I just want to mount him and bang everything between us right out. Hell, the last time I was with him, he had me playing chess until I just wanted him to bend me over the board and--"
"Oh God," Vaan interrupted, shaken to his very core. "No more. Just stop!"
"Wuss," Penelo said almost affectionately. Vaan made a face back at her before he realized just what he wanted to know right now.
"So then, I mean... why don't you? I mean, I know you're the biggest goddamn worry wart this side of Migelo and clearly you’ve got some sort of crazy I-need-to-torture-myself-over-nothing genes in you but… well. Seriously. Why bother about politics so much?"
She gave him a rather dry look. "Yeah, Vaan, not worrying about any of that makes sense. Because that's never something to be concerned about with Larsa."
Vaan wasn't sidetracked. "But that isn't all of it, is it, Pen? Don't think I spent all these years being nagged by you without figuring out that much."
And she sighed in that way that always meant that he’d somehow managed to surprise her by not being as irrepressibly dumb as she usually wanted him to be, right before she went on.
"Nah, that isn't it. It's just... Fuck, Vaan, I’m not actually stupid. I know he wants me. I know he’s wanted me before he was even someone worth wanting. I know all I'd have to do is spread my legs in one part of his palace and he'd come running right after. It's just..."
Vaan bent down a little, until her head was resting on his shoulder. Her nose bumped against his neck when she next spoke.
"It's just that I don't know if he loves me, the real me, the one you know all about. Sometimes I think he wants me just because he knew me when he was still a kid, when he could chase after me without having to worry about his empire. And I'm his friend and he's apparently got really bad taste in ladies and sometimes it’s like all he wants to do is put me on a pedestal and pretend that I'm ... some sweet little angel of hope that’ll never go away from his life.”
When she lifted her eyes back up to Vaan’s they were swollen but not wet. Somehow, that made him proud.
"I don't know if he'd love me if he really knew me. And I'm pretty sure he'd never even figure it out unless we really did get together. So what am I supposed to do? Cut him off from my life? Tell him that I don’t want him, even though I do? Or just ignore all the political crap and seduce him before he seduces me, just to show him what I'm really like?”
If there was one thing Vaan knew and despaired about Penelo, it was the fact that she was probably the worst decision maker he had ever encountered in his entire life. He wasn’t sure if it was due to some traumatic past of hers or if she’d been born stunted but most of the time, but somehow, she would always either decide things by the very spur of the moment or take a nauseatingly slow time figuring out just what to do, dragging her foot at every turn until something forced her to get a move on.
But Vaan had been her friend for close to one and a half decades and he knew just how to push Penelo’s buttons to get her to finally do what she had always wanted to do. And frankly speaking, Vaan knew that if he had to see these two idiots dance around each other for another six years, he might end up stabbing himself in the face just to get away from the never ending foreplay. He knew Penelo could be a tease sometimes but this was getting ridiculous.
Desperate times called for desperate measures and sometimes, a sky pirate just had to do what he had to do.
"Why the hell not?" Vaan suggested carelessly. "If nothing else, it'd be an interesting way to turn the tables on him and get some power back for yourself. It’d be sort of sad to let some scrawny rich kid that used to run around in heels and tights get one up on you without you taking charge for once."
And there were a lot of things, Vaan knew, that Penelo wouldn't do for money. There were quite a number of things she wouldn't do for the sake of her pride or dignity or sky pirating status either. And there were maybe even a couple of things she wouldn't do for love or for friendship, though those were far and few between.
But if there was one thing Penelo would do almost anything for, it was her extremely strange sense of humor. And right now, Vaan had a feeling if nothing else, this could finally help her make up her mind.
"It would," she eventually said, "be pretty hilarious to see a lady sky pirate seduce the hell out an emperor that's been after her around since he was twelve, wouldn't it?"
"Maybe," Vaan said blandly. "And if it doesn't work out in the end, you could always turn around and blame it on me the way you like so much."
Penelo made a terrifying sound that could only be described as a titter (oh, she really was drunk now) and leaned over to lay her heavy head on Vaan's shoulder. "All right then. Assuming I do lose my mind and try to pull Operation Bang the Emperor's Brains Out Until He Stops Being Stupid off... Larsa's eighteenth birthday is just over next month. Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
And he closed his eyes and thought of Larsa's face whenever he spoke of Penelo and Penelo's face whenever she spoke of Larsa and thought: What the hell. Maybe this is enough.
"I think I am. But how are we supposed to use our left-over stash of alcohol and your bare naked body to take over the world?"
"For once," Penelo said brightly, "you've got the right idea after all. I guess we're just gonna have to do the same-old same-old at Larsa's if we wanna carry this off with style. And all the better if only we could work some sort of threesome into the deal..."
"I'm not drunk enough to plan for that," Vaan muttered in a sort of hushed, sacrilegious horror. “All the liquor in the world wouldn’t be enough to prepare me for something like that.”
She just shrugged. “Your loss. But are you drunk enough to start celebrating the start of something new and possibly totally disastrous right now?”
And that was something he could toast to for the rest of his life.
*
The inevitable happened only three days later. And oddly enough, in the end, Vaan didn’t know and didn’t want to know the details of just what Penelo had planned and done to bag her prey that fateful night. All that he could figure out-- and this was mostly because people kept insisting on telling him, as though he could just drag Penelo away from something she really wanted without a tranquilizer dart or twelve-- was that it had happened sometime during the day of Larsa's official coming of age at eighteen.
Vaan had been there, of course, and he-- and the rest of the ballroom, he was pretty sure-- had seen the way Larsa's eyes had lit up like all the chandeliers in the room when a masked lady with a most luxurious mane of golden hair had entered the fete and charmed the Emperor right out of his very mind. He had boggled properly when she had cut a swathe through legions of upper-class admirers and stopped the music dead when she had insisted on taking her place by the Emperor’s side. And Vaan had even stuck around when they had danced nearly every dance in the ball together, when they had ignored everyone in the room but each other and when they disappeared together from the public view right about the stroke of midnight.
Hell, he and Basch had even been the one to keep Larsa's other guardians from figuring out where they had gone with liberal uses of vanishga, green magic and poisoned canapes. The last wasn’t strictly necessary but, as Basch had said, sometimes there was a great deal of pleasure gained from using the classics.
After all, they both had figured that even the craziest of the crazy needed a bit of privacy when doing the whole "sweeping you off your feet" thing for each other. Even if Vaan had to admit that he didn't quite know who was sweeping who off their feet right now.
*
She came back to their ship the next morning, with flower petals in her hair and a smile on her face and a certain strut to her walk. She didn’t even speak about it for the first day or so she was back, just drifted around with a goofy smile and made small talk about just where they should go for their next vacation-- didn’t the Phon Coast sound nice this time of year?-- and made pancakes for breakfast that all came out in the shape of lopsided hearts.
Because she was leaving, Vaan knew, already leaving in some way she didn‘t know anything about either. And all he could do was look at her-- at her eyes and her smile and the freckles forming on her skin-- and decide that for her sake, he’d try to be happy, try to be supportive, try not to worry about what’d happen when all this was done.
It wasn’t up to him, anyway. And as long as she was happy, it really ought to be enough.
And when she finally decided to start talking about it, he realized that getting her to also shut up would have always been nice.
"I think god invented younger men because they are the best thing ever in the history of everything that‘s ever been done."
Vaan had to fight hard to keep from shuddering at the possible meanings of what she was saying. “So I guess everything with you two crazy loons went fine?
"God yes," she said with a sweetly nostalgic and slightly dirty grin that made the hairs on Vaan's neck raise up with alarm. "Peachy keen. Perfectly wonderful. Good enough that I'm willing to forgive you for getting me piss drunk."
Now that he had to roll his eyes at. "Oh please, you just used that as an excuse to finally get a move on things. And…” And here he hesitated but even a couple of bruises would be worth knowing. “And, are you… happy now?"
For a moment, Penelo seemed almost startled by the question. But then she smiled and her tell-tale blush flooded her cheeks and then he knew it was all right.
"Yeah, Vaan. I really am. And... and I know I bitched about everything that's against us before and even being happy's not enough to leave it all behind. But... I really do want to give it a chance with Larsa and see where we end up. Sometimes you just have to have hope in the future, right?”
As far as Vaan could tell, that about summed up it. "Hell, you might as well as well. What else could you possibly give up now?"
She raised her eyebrows impressively-- another trick she had cadged from Larsa. "Whatever virtue I managed to keep till now?"
Vaan had to laugh at that. "Yeah, because you're just so damn virtuous when you're trying to get hold of treasure by dropping a bit of trou--"
Later that evening, Vaan would find out that there were at least thirteen different ways to torture a person with a roll of duck-tape and a stick of butter… and Penelo had, unluckily for him, somehow mastered them all.
*
Author‘s Note: A few of my wonderful reviewers have noted previously that Penelo and Vaan (and probably Larsa as well, now that he has a more prominent role) sound a bit OOC in this fic. I just wanted to clarify that that sort of OOCness-- at least compared to their incarnations in the FFXII canon-- was actually planned for. After all, during the majority of this piece, Penelo and Vaan have spent almost six years of their lives being romanticized criminals… and Larsa has spent the last six years being the ruler of a large and incredibly cut-throat and competitive empire. But after six years, they‘ve all become mature, hardened and rather cynical adults, rather than being the cute, innocent, and rather sheltered (after all, even Penelo and Vaan had Migelo to get their asses out of trouble) children that they were in the game itself.
In any case, this series is still for the luminous artemischan and for wonderful threewalls, who beta’d the hell out of this and helped salvage the original sprawling mess I served up to her. And my apologies ahead of time to the outrageously talented mithrigil. I guess you can think of Larsa’s way of “getting” the girl here as a sort of, er, homage? ;)
And as always, comments and questions are very much appreciated! This is probably the last long story I’ll ever write and I’d love to know whether or not it’s working for everyone! ♥
Title: Of Pirates and Plottings (Part 2/3) [ Part 1] & [ Part 3]
Fandom: Final Fantasy XII
Series: The Uses of Enchantment
Characters/Pairings: Vaan, Larsa/Penelo, Larsa/Penelo/Vaan (Despite all of Vaan's protests to the contrary!)
Rating: R, strong language, sexual situations
Summary: Even someone stuck in the margins of a fairy tale can spin an interesting story.
*
In the end, strangely enough, Vaan arrived at his destination just as his evil twin left, even managing to get a glimpse of her as she had gone. There had been flowers in her hands and new ribbons in her hair and the kind of shy, almost girlish smile that Vaan could have sworn she’d stop being able to give around men sometime around when Balthier had passed on.
It reminded him, almost, of the way Penelo had been around Vaan‘s brother, of all the little things she had done to get his sibling’s attention, of the sort of glow that had always come around her when she had been fourteen years old and trying to be as graceful as possible whenever Reks had been around.
He missed that girl, Vaan had to admit. And he had thought she’d gone completely or just been buried forever, underneath all the armor Penelo always tried to put on. But she was there and somehow, Larsa seemed to have some strange way of constantly resurrecting her.
And more than anything, that was probably why Vaan stopped hiding in the curtains and made his way to Larsa, watching his friend watch his partner as she made her way out.
“She almost looks harmless like that,” Vaan whispered almost into the emperor‘s ear, “doesn’t she?”
To Larsa’s credit, he didn’t even flinch, just stood up straighter than ever and opened his eyes even wider, as though to get one last glimpse of Penelo before she turned around a corner and vanished from his sight. “Perhaps another man more ignorant of her peculiar brand of precision might find that to be the case. But we both know her well enough to know that she’s most dangerous when she looks most at ease, correct?”
“Hell yeah,” Vaan agreed, laughing. “I once saw her almost disembowel a man with a pen knife when she was pretending to be a harem girl and he called her sugar thighs one too many times.” And at Larsa’s wide eyes, he had to grin. “And the nickname stuck, which was the funny thing. Even if she bitch about having Turkish delights in her jumpsuits for a few weeks afterwards.”
“Oh,” Larsa said, and smiled slightly, incredibly forked eyebrows rearing up. “I was wondering why the privateers in my realm kept insisting on calling her the Dread Pirate Sugar Thighs for the last few months I spent watching out for her. I knew there had to be a story but it simply wasn‘t one I could yet tease out.”
Now this… this was something both new and old, something Vaan had always suspected but never had evidence of till now. “So that means that you really are trailing the two of us after all?"
"Not quite," his old friend demurely corrected. "I've been merely watching out for her. That you were often on the scene as her partner and accessory was merely a very... interesting fallout."
"Huh," Vaan said, and wondered if he ought to get upset. But then... that would explain just the sort of strange deus ex machinas that had often served to get Penelo and him out of ass-reams of trouble whenever they bit off more than they chewed which was, Vaan had to admit, sort of terribly often. He didn‘t worry enough and Penelo usually worried too much and that was sort of a guaranteed recipe for disaster on some of their more outrageous schemes. "I don't really mind, since that probably saved our rear plenty of times but... er... you do realize that Penelo'd probably kick your ass a little for thinking she's a pushover if she ever found out?"
That startled a laugh out of Larsa. "Very much so. And having seen her on the battle field in years past, I have no doubt that she'd be able to carry out that task with complete ease. But," and here his mouth softened, turned to lines it still startled Vaan to see an Archadian could keep, "even the possibility of dire punishment seems worth it to keep her safe."
"Yeah," Vaan said softly. "She can sometimes make you feel that way, can't she?"
Larsa inclined his head in what Vaan took be a sort of yes. “Perhaps we could sit down and share a few bottles of wine and talk this all over?”
And after eyeing said bottles already scattered thoroughly from Penelo‘s last visit, Vaan shrugged. “Oh what the hell, I’m already here and I’m pretty sure she likes me too much to main me permanently. Why the hell not?”
*
And though Vaan knew Penelo really might maim him permanently if she ever found out, he ended up staying up almost the whole night with Larsa, speaking about damn near anything and everything, and whatever floated through their mind.
They talked about Penelo, of course: what she liked and what she did and how she was getting along now. Larsa let him ramble on and on about her weird little habits and all her strange little routines, like why she always wanted people around her to have clean fingernails (“She always said she couldn’t stand dirt under there, reminded her too much of the last time she saw her brothers”) and went about making decisions in the worst ways possible (“She decides just where we should go at the last minute then yelling at me when we're the last ones on the scene!") and how she always took a stupidly long time in the shower ("And she carols within the tub too on occasion, yes?" "Oh, you poor bastard. Did she make you stand outside and listen to her singing because you didn't like her cooking either?" "No, that was not… precisely how it played out…")
But they talked about other things too, things even Vaan found himself surprised to be speaking of. Politics, for half an hour, and Vaan was pleased to know that though he couldn’t really match Larsa’s mind there-- not that that was much of a surprise-- at least he knew enough about the way Balfonheim worked to get around Archadia to surprise Larsa into being a little alarmed. And after politics, they had turned to sports and childhoods, how they’d grown up, and the parents they’d had, and the lessons they’d learned and the games they had played and just who they‘d played those games with--and learning that Larsa’s main playmates had been the gigantic armored thugs of the empire just explained so damn much.
And brothers as well, since having ones that screwed them over but good seemed to be the one thing they had in common, besides being driven mad (though in totally different ways) by a certain braided somebody.
Brothers as well-- and for the first time in years, Vaan had talked about Reks, about how he had run off to fight and came home and died and left him with nothing, almost nothing, besides a friend whose heart he had almost broken completely. And Larsa talked too, with a half-drained cup of wine in his hand and a voice almost indistinct to the point of sounding coarse, about his brother as well, and his father, and all that they'd left him in turn.
"An emblem," Larsa said, gestures towards his chest with his hand, fingers arching towards nothing and everything. "A mantle. A duty. A responsibility. They wanted my life and my years and my blood. And I‘ll sacrifice them as well, when they need me to. And the only thing I’ve ever wanted in recompense for all of that, for sacrificing everything, is and has always been her."
Sometimes, Vaan knew, it was best to be quiet, to see the strangest of moments play out.
"I love her," Larsa said, and his eyes when they turned to Vaan's looked faintly desperate, a little pathetic, and more sad than Vaan could ever remember them being before. But then, he wouldn’t really know anyway. It hadn't been him who had been with Larsa when his brother had died, when he had become emperor, when he had faced a future without a father or a brother or a mentor or a guardian proper, with all the world before him and a place that left him no way out.
It had always been Penelo who had stood by Larsa during all those times. And maybe that was why Larsa was whispering to Vaan just what he was right now.
"I love her," the Emperor said again, and his words were simple and clear and honest and calm, as though they meant everything and couldn‘t be dammed up. "And I love her and I love her and I love her and I love her and even if I could find a way to do so, I wouldn’t stop. I want to live with her and I want to die with her and I want to everything with her for all the rest of my life. And for once, all I want is for her to look at me and not look away and pretend she doesn’t see what must be apparent even to her biased eyes.”
"And," Vaan said, and can barely believe he was saying it. "And so you want me to... to what? Help you? Point you? Tell you what to do to get her to actually pay attention to you, instead of ignoring you like she likes to ignore everything she doesn‘t know if she wants?"
"Yes," his old friend said, mouth curving up into a funny little smile. "If you’ve any suggestions on how to circumvent that eventuality, I’d much prefer hearing it now."
Vaan had to sigh at what he was asking. "Hell, you know how stubborn Penelo can be when she's made up her mind about something. It’s not like she’s a lock you can just pick-- you’ve got to really goddamn work on her when she thinks she’s got something figured out. And… and… and what the hell, I’m a pirate! What would I even get out of stepping into this mess anyways?!”
"Anything you want," Larsa said quietly. "Anything you need. I've an entire empire at my disposal and you may plunder from it freely. Take whatever you would like or desire."
Somehow, Vaan had a feeling that’d end up being his answer. And it was tempting as hell, god only knew, but that wasn’t what he’d come here for right now.
"And what if," he finally said softly, "I want to see her happy? Do you think you could promise me that much?"
The smile that broke over Larsa's face at that was almost painful to look at, like staring into the sun during an eclipse that covered over everything. "I can do that, I believe. I would try with all my heart."
And as far as Vaan is concerned... that was really enough for now..
"Take care of her," Vaan finally said, knowing that everything else he needed to know, he had sort of figured out ahead of time. "I’ll help but as much as I can but, hell, if you break your promise, I might have to kill you. I might have to kill you an awful lot.”
For a minute, the Emperor of all of the grandest empire in all of Ivalice paused. And when he finally answered, he did it through a smile that made him seem almost like the young boy Vaan had known in years that had already left them behind so swiftly.
And maybe, Vaan thought, that was just why Penelo seemed to love him more and more every time he was in her sight.
"You needn't worry on that account," Larsa says softly. "I could never bring myself to do otherwise. And, if anything, it’s always been she who’s taken best care of me and kept me from troubles I’d otherwise find."
*
It's just the same for me, buddy, Vaan thought as he slowly made his way back home, back to Penelo, back to the little airship that had been their home for almost five years and had at most maybe another five to serve the both of them.
It’s just the same for me. And now I’m just trying to make it all up.
*
And so he had found little ways to help them both as the months had gone by and Penelo had opened her eyes little by little to what had always been hiding in plain sight.
He owed them both, frankly speaking. Larsa, because Vaan knew he hadn’t done enough to help him in the first place, always trusting that something would turn up, always trusting that somehow Larsa would find his way despite everything against him in the world, just because he’d been born with a silver spoon in his mouth and Vaan had assumed that just because of that, it didn’t matter what else hit him in his life.
And Penelo because-- well. Just because. Even if it meant losing a little bit of her, night by night by night.
Not that it felt that way most of the time. Because she was still very much Vaan's partner, very much his best friend, and very much the same crazy flirt she'd always been since she had turned thirteen and finally had some actual curves on her body. She was Vaan's main accessory in crime, still the backseat driver to his front seat psychopath and still the one who bullied him relentlessly into actually planning things once in a while. She still refused to laugh at his best dirty jokes and still used up all the hot water in their ship for her never-ending showers and still dragged the most interesting men (and occasionally Aeguls) back to her bunk and did the most incredibly noisy things with them that Vaan had to retaliate against with any stray viera he can lure back on his own.
She was still his partner and she was still the Penelo he had known and sometimes, it almost felt like nothing could ever change the life they'd grown accustomed to. And sometimes, Vaan even found himself wishing that was the case.
But things were changing and Vaan could chart them just as easily as he learned to encourage her trips to the north and needle her about just what she did there and piss her off by talking about just how much tail Larsa must have gotten by this time.
Things were changing, they really were, especially with Penelo spending more and more of her free time in Archades, whose emperor had apparently taken to leaving his throne with mysterious fevers for days at a time. Things were changing and Vaan could read it as easily as he could see how more and more of Penelo’s men had turned into androgynous pretty boys with dark hair and scrawny limbs and large, light colored eyes.
Vaan knew better than to ask though and contented himself with simply rolling his eyes and saying a few scattered prayers for the two stupidest and love-sick dopes he had ever known in his life.
And one day, Penelo came back to their ship and looked at Vaan and told him that she had found herself kissing Larsa for the first time. And even if Vaan had thought about this ahead of time, he knew that he wouldn't have been able to predict the way she'd look afterwards-- flushed but trembling, pale but bright, incandescent with happiness but almost scared right out of her mind.
"What the hell was I even thinking?" she asked, and there were no tears in her eyes but her hand were trembling. "And now just what the bloody hell am I supposed to now do?"
*
They talked for much of the rest of the night and in an odd way, it wasn’t all that different from being with Larsa-- albeit a Larsa that wasn’t afraid to aim below the belt when Vaan asked if the person who had tried to kiss her was maybe just suffering from really poor eyesight. And because he knew that nothing was probably better for these kinds of things than a good couple of shots of whiskey, he had even benevolently dug into his emergency stash when she had inevitably ran out of the Rozarrian rum that she so liked.
"And the thing is," Penelo said, somewhere in between her fourth drink and her ninth, "is that I don't even know why he likes me. I really don't! I mean, he's like--" and she wiggled her fingers into the air around her head desperately, "--and I'm like--" and she sort of swayed them around her midsection right now "--y'know what I’m talking about, right?”
"Not really," Vaan had to admit. "And I don’t know why you always have to make things so jumbled up anyway. You like him. He’s been hot for you since before his voice broke. What the hell’s the problem anyway? What’s keeping you from making a real man out of him anyway?”
Right now, Penelo looked rather as though she was thinking of regurgitating everything she had already taken in for the night. "First off, let’s not even get into the whole puberty thing, Vaan. It’s weird enough that he’s younger than me-- I don’t need to think of what he was like before he even grew out of his cute little booties. And if you--” Suddenly she looked rather thunder-struck. “If you figured this all out, who else might have done it too?!”
Vaan tried to shrug as innocently as possible and not let it on that pretty much everyone who had ever seen the two of them together, ever, probably had some idea. “No clue, just like always. And anyway, does it even matter? Again, you like him. He likes you. What’s keeping you from doing all these incredibly gross things that I don’t even want to think about with each other?”
And now Penelo was biting her lip and looking down with a flush on her face that Vaan just knew meant that she wanted something very, very badly indeed but was too stupid to actually go after it because of her conscience or something equally dumb. “Because it’s not just about what I want… it’s about what’s good for the both of us in the future. And… c’mon, Vaan, goofy ideas about the power of love aside, he’s an emperor and I’m… hell, I’m not exactly empress material, am I? Even if I liked him, I’d have to be goofier than you around a gaggle of vieras to think we'd ever be able to make it in the long rung.”
“But do you want him in the future?” Vaan asked, curious almost despite himself. “I mean, you never shut up about him and you’re always going off to see him and the last time I came to Archades, you sure as hell were touching him an awful lot…”
She glared at Vaan for that but it was a pretty lazy glare in her arsenal of stares, the sort of glare that was about as internally paralyzing as a pat on the back. Vaan just stared blankly back, using the power of obliviousness to shield him like always, and she gave in after a moment. Playing dumb-- or at least dumber-- really was a good idea sometimes.
"It's not that I don't want to find out what it'd be like," she finally admitted, and in vino there really was veritas. "Because sometimes-- hell, a lot of the times-- he’s just so cute and so sweet and so friendly and so... so... so... so goddamn fuckable, until I just want to mount him and bang everything between us right out. Hell, the last time I was with him, he had me playing chess until I just wanted him to bend me over the board and--"
"Oh God," Vaan interrupted, shaken to his very core. "No more. Just stop!"
"Wuss," Penelo said almost affectionately. Vaan made a face back at her before he realized just what he wanted to know right now.
"So then, I mean... why don't you? I mean, I know you're the biggest goddamn worry wart this side of Migelo and clearly you’ve got some sort of crazy I-need-to-torture-myself-over-nothing genes in you but… well. Seriously. Why bother about politics so much?"
She gave him a rather dry look. "Yeah, Vaan, not worrying about any of that makes sense. Because that's never something to be concerned about with Larsa."
Vaan wasn't sidetracked. "But that isn't all of it, is it, Pen? Don't think I spent all these years being nagged by you without figuring out that much."
And she sighed in that way that always meant that he’d somehow managed to surprise her by not being as irrepressibly dumb as she usually wanted him to be, right before she went on.
"Nah, that isn't it. It's just... Fuck, Vaan, I’m not actually stupid. I know he wants me. I know he’s wanted me before he was even someone worth wanting. I know all I'd have to do is spread my legs in one part of his palace and he'd come running right after. It's just..."
Vaan bent down a little, until her head was resting on his shoulder. Her nose bumped against his neck when she next spoke.
"It's just that I don't know if he loves me, the real me, the one you know all about. Sometimes I think he wants me just because he knew me when he was still a kid, when he could chase after me without having to worry about his empire. And I'm his friend and he's apparently got really bad taste in ladies and sometimes it’s like all he wants to do is put me on a pedestal and pretend that I'm ... some sweet little angel of hope that’ll never go away from his life.”
When she lifted her eyes back up to Vaan’s they were swollen but not wet. Somehow, that made him proud.
"I don't know if he'd love me if he really knew me. And I'm pretty sure he'd never even figure it out unless we really did get together. So what am I supposed to do? Cut him off from my life? Tell him that I don’t want him, even though I do? Or just ignore all the political crap and seduce him before he seduces me, just to show him what I'm really like?”
If there was one thing Vaan knew and despaired about Penelo, it was the fact that she was probably the worst decision maker he had ever encountered in his entire life. He wasn’t sure if it was due to some traumatic past of hers or if she’d been born stunted but most of the time, but somehow, she would always either decide things by the very spur of the moment or take a nauseatingly slow time figuring out just what to do, dragging her foot at every turn until something forced her to get a move on.
But Vaan had been her friend for close to one and a half decades and he knew just how to push Penelo’s buttons to get her to finally do what she had always wanted to do. And frankly speaking, Vaan knew that if he had to see these two idiots dance around each other for another six years, he might end up stabbing himself in the face just to get away from the never ending foreplay. He knew Penelo could be a tease sometimes but this was getting ridiculous.
Desperate times called for desperate measures and sometimes, a sky pirate just had to do what he had to do.
"Why the hell not?" Vaan suggested carelessly. "If nothing else, it'd be an interesting way to turn the tables on him and get some power back for yourself. It’d be sort of sad to let some scrawny rich kid that used to run around in heels and tights get one up on you without you taking charge for once."
And there were a lot of things, Vaan knew, that Penelo wouldn't do for money. There were quite a number of things she wouldn't do for the sake of her pride or dignity or sky pirating status either. And there were maybe even a couple of things she wouldn't do for love or for friendship, though those were far and few between.
But if there was one thing Penelo would do almost anything for, it was her extremely strange sense of humor. And right now, Vaan had a feeling if nothing else, this could finally help her make up her mind.
"It would," she eventually said, "be pretty hilarious to see a lady sky pirate seduce the hell out an emperor that's been after her around since he was twelve, wouldn't it?"
"Maybe," Vaan said blandly. "And if it doesn't work out in the end, you could always turn around and blame it on me the way you like so much."
Penelo made a terrifying sound that could only be described as a titter (oh, she really was drunk now) and leaned over to lay her heavy head on Vaan's shoulder. "All right then. Assuming I do lose my mind and try to pull Operation Bang the Emperor's Brains Out Until He Stops Being Stupid off... Larsa's eighteenth birthday is just over next month. Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
And he closed his eyes and thought of Larsa's face whenever he spoke of Penelo and Penelo's face whenever she spoke of Larsa and thought: What the hell. Maybe this is enough.
"I think I am. But how are we supposed to use our left-over stash of alcohol and your bare naked body to take over the world?"
"For once," Penelo said brightly, "you've got the right idea after all. I guess we're just gonna have to do the same-old same-old at Larsa's if we wanna carry this off with style. And all the better if only we could work some sort of threesome into the deal..."
"I'm not drunk enough to plan for that," Vaan muttered in a sort of hushed, sacrilegious horror. “All the liquor in the world wouldn’t be enough to prepare me for something like that.”
She just shrugged. “Your loss. But are you drunk enough to start celebrating the start of something new and possibly totally disastrous right now?”
And that was something he could toast to for the rest of his life.
*
The inevitable happened only three days later. And oddly enough, in the end, Vaan didn’t know and didn’t want to know the details of just what Penelo had planned and done to bag her prey that fateful night. All that he could figure out-- and this was mostly because people kept insisting on telling him, as though he could just drag Penelo away from something she really wanted without a tranquilizer dart or twelve-- was that it had happened sometime during the day of Larsa's official coming of age at eighteen.
Vaan had been there, of course, and he-- and the rest of the ballroom, he was pretty sure-- had seen the way Larsa's eyes had lit up like all the chandeliers in the room when a masked lady with a most luxurious mane of golden hair had entered the fete and charmed the Emperor right out of his very mind. He had boggled properly when she had cut a swathe through legions of upper-class admirers and stopped the music dead when she had insisted on taking her place by the Emperor’s side. And Vaan had even stuck around when they had danced nearly every dance in the ball together, when they had ignored everyone in the room but each other and when they disappeared together from the public view right about the stroke of midnight.
Hell, he and Basch had even been the one to keep Larsa's other guardians from figuring out where they had gone with liberal uses of vanishga, green magic and poisoned canapes. The last wasn’t strictly necessary but, as Basch had said, sometimes there was a great deal of pleasure gained from using the classics.
After all, they both had figured that even the craziest of the crazy needed a bit of privacy when doing the whole "sweeping you off your feet" thing for each other. Even if Vaan had to admit that he didn't quite know who was sweeping who off their feet right now.
*
She came back to their ship the next morning, with flower petals in her hair and a smile on her face and a certain strut to her walk. She didn’t even speak about it for the first day or so she was back, just drifted around with a goofy smile and made small talk about just where they should go for their next vacation-- didn’t the Phon Coast sound nice this time of year?-- and made pancakes for breakfast that all came out in the shape of lopsided hearts.
Because she was leaving, Vaan knew, already leaving in some way she didn‘t know anything about either. And all he could do was look at her-- at her eyes and her smile and the freckles forming on her skin-- and decide that for her sake, he’d try to be happy, try to be supportive, try not to worry about what’d happen when all this was done.
It wasn’t up to him, anyway. And as long as she was happy, it really ought to be enough.
And when she finally decided to start talking about it, he realized that getting her to also shut up would have always been nice.
"I think god invented younger men because they are the best thing ever in the history of everything that‘s ever been done."
Vaan had to fight hard to keep from shuddering at the possible meanings of what she was saying. “So I guess everything with you two crazy loons went fine?
"God yes," she said with a sweetly nostalgic and slightly dirty grin that made the hairs on Vaan's neck raise up with alarm. "Peachy keen. Perfectly wonderful. Good enough that I'm willing to forgive you for getting me piss drunk."
Now that he had to roll his eyes at. "Oh please, you just used that as an excuse to finally get a move on things. And…” And here he hesitated but even a couple of bruises would be worth knowing. “And, are you… happy now?"
For a moment, Penelo seemed almost startled by the question. But then she smiled and her tell-tale blush flooded her cheeks and then he knew it was all right.
"Yeah, Vaan. I really am. And... and I know I bitched about everything that's against us before and even being happy's not enough to leave it all behind. But... I really do want to give it a chance with Larsa and see where we end up. Sometimes you just have to have hope in the future, right?”
As far as Vaan could tell, that about summed up it. "Hell, you might as well as well. What else could you possibly give up now?"
She raised her eyebrows impressively-- another trick she had cadged from Larsa. "Whatever virtue I managed to keep till now?"
Vaan had to laugh at that. "Yeah, because you're just so damn virtuous when you're trying to get hold of treasure by dropping a bit of trou--"
Later that evening, Vaan would find out that there were at least thirteen different ways to torture a person with a roll of duck-tape and a stick of butter… and Penelo had, unluckily for him, somehow mastered them all.
*
Author‘s Note: A few of my wonderful reviewers have noted previously that Penelo and Vaan (and probably Larsa as well, now that he has a more prominent role) sound a bit OOC in this fic. I just wanted to clarify that that sort of OOCness-- at least compared to their incarnations in the FFXII canon-- was actually planned for. After all, during the majority of this piece, Penelo and Vaan have spent almost six years of their lives being romanticized criminals… and Larsa has spent the last six years being the ruler of a large and incredibly cut-throat and competitive empire. But after six years, they‘ve all become mature, hardened and rather cynical adults, rather than being the cute, innocent, and rather sheltered (after all, even Penelo and Vaan had Migelo to get their asses out of trouble) children that they were in the game itself.