A/N: In which Balthier and Fran make their escape from Bahamut. This is inspired by the pure genius of Wreathsandbells [.com], and her fic "Four and Twenty Blackbirds."
Poetry In The Dark
--
ONE
--
"Tho' through his nine hells each man must walk, this one hell is mine, and I know none other.
Bear me hence, dark fates, that I may sleep and die."
-- Pheristho's Tales, Ch. 4: The Vow
Balthier woke to searing pain in his right arm. He couldn't feel his hand; when he thought to wiggle his fingers a fang of pain rent up his arm into his shoulder and burst like a firework in his head. He had to grit his teeth to keep from screaming.
Not good. All right, just breathe. Don't think, just breathe. Damn it all to the fires of... Breathe.
He forced himself to breathe slowly, in through his nose and out through his mouth. He couldn't afford to pass out again.
Thump thump. Scrape. Thump thump. Whrrrrrrrrrr.
Balthier covered his eyes with his (blessedly whole) left hand. He liked the darkness behind his eyelids. It was familiar, it was safe, it was calming. Besides which, should he open his eyes he might find Fran a mangled great bloody mess, or worse, not there at all.
Thump thump. Scrape. Scrrrrrape.
Balthier grappled for the communicator at his waist, unhooked it from his belt, and pressed the button, eyes resolutely closed.
"Vaan!"
Fizzle, crackle, sputter. Hiss. The memstone inside the device must have gone dead hours ago. He'd thought, naively perhaps, that it would hold out long enough for him to call in his position once they'd landed...
Pfah.
He let his head drop back onto the catwalk and waited.
Thump thump. Whrrrrrrrrrrr. Thump thump thump.
"...thier?"
Fran. Encouraged, he opened his eyes and was greeted with indistinct shadows, curling ominously with smoke. The shadows flickered in the light of an electrical fire, grey and orange, rapidly fading. They would be in blackness soon enough.
"O sweet fates, who call a man back from the horrific claws of fear's embrace."
Silence.
"Can you hear me, Fran?"
A shadow to his left that he had previously thought to be a twisted chunk of metal stirred, and he saw dimly the outline of one of Fran's black-tipped ears.
"Hhhnnn?"
He tested his weight on his left arm; it held. He crawled a short distance toward her on his good elbow, letting his right arm drag along beside him.
"You live." She reached for his face with searching, tender fingers. Her voice was weak and raspy.
"It would seem. Are you injured?"
"I... Aghn."
He patted along her ribcage with his left hand, searching, and found the wound along the edge of her stomacher. It was not long, but it was deep; thankfully it felt as though no shrapnel had lodged within it. His fingers came away warm and sticky. She gave a little groan of protest and jerked away from him slightly. He clucked his tongue gently in consolation.
"At least it bleeds clean... but I'll be better able to heal it if you'd hold still."
Balthier awkwardly drew up a Curaga spell one-handed, and pressed it into her side. She exhaled gratefully.
Skrrrrritch. Thump-thump. Whrrrrrrrrr.
"Tr'asje...?"
He didn't know what the noise was, either. Wasn't about to care.
"Never mind, my heart. Lie still, now, I'll find a..."
A fizzling sound, a puff of air, and the light died. The darkness amplified the strange whirring noise far below them.
"Ah, good. The light was giving me an headache."
--
TWO
--
"I, Nivaeh, am strength incarnate with the placid face of courage; A beacon shineth from my breast.
For tho' ye wander in the dark, ye shall not falter... O, Thou My Soul! Be stalwart."
-- Nivaeh's Prayer
Clickclickclickclickwhrrrrrrrrrr.
"Bully for you," Balthier whispered, and took the stopper from a third potion with his teeth. The noise was beginning to sicken him.
"If you ever want to use your arm again, you will cease wasting our potions and let me tend to you."
He heard a shuffle and a scrape as she crawled toward him, felt her hands search over his leg. Eventually she guided herself through the dark to his side, and he felt the tip of her ear brush his cheek as she tilted her head, listening to his heartbeat.
"You are feverish," she said, and reached across him; he was unsure what she was reaching for until he felt the weight of his pack slide across his body and heard it and on the other side of him with a soft thump.
"'O thou my soul, be stalwart, for though wander I in the dark, I shall not falter...' No, that isn't right," he muttered.
"Pheristho must wait. Hold still."
She laid something cool and sticky to his right arm; the pain flared, then numbed.
Clickclickclickclickclickclick... thump.
"I'll kill it when we find it."
"I doubt it is alive, Ffamran."
"Don't call me that."
Silence.
"I don't care what it is. I'll kill it... Where's that flask of demon drink? Look in my bag, won't you?"
"I sold it in Balfonheim."
He banged the back of his head against the catwalk in frustration. "Damn it, I was going to drink that."
Her reply was sharp, reproachful. "You were going to do no such thing. All the spirits we found in the Necrohol are cursed."
Balthier groaned. "What's the harm? We're going to die anyway."
She did not reply.
Thump thump. Skritch. Whrrrrrrrrrr.
"We move on now. Get up."
He listened to her get to her feet and rubbed his eyes; the dark was giving him an headache. "My mother would have liked you, I think. I have a feeling she was just as officious and stubborn as you are."
She nudged him with one foot persuasively. "Did you not hear me, Ffamran? We go."
"There you are; officious."
Following the rail led them to a wall of debris, twisted metal and broken glass. Fran felt her way around it.
She hissed. "Aii, tr' qwr'dleh ue' albjr-neh. My hand."
The stillborn of hell? Balthier gave a low whistle at her poetically foul mouth.
"Well, come here, let me..."
"No, wait; there is a stair here."
A shuffling noise he could not place, and then,
"Yes. We go."
The stair led them to another block; this one could not be dug through or skirted round. They tracked back to where they had begun and turned, following the rail to a drop in the catwalk, where something had sheared it away.
"We're trapped, aren't we?"
"We are not trapped. I smell rain."
"Fran, Don't be irrational. It's unattractive."
Balthier felt along the railing, stumbled, and went to his knees. He heard a quick series of clanks, the split spike heels of her shoes clacking across the catwalk away from him.
"I tell you, I smell rain, Ffamran."
Whrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Scrape.
He closed his eyes; it did nothing to ease the ache in his head.
"You never cease to confound me, Fran."
He thought he might faint; he pressed his hand to his forehead and squeezed his eyes shut hard until his ears rang.
"Hold still..."
Something brushed his cheek; he jumped.
"Shhh. Tr'a zhis. Aii, nin'frjt..."
It was indeed only her hand. He tilted his head toward it, considering the smooth cool plane of it, soothing against his face.
Scrrrrrrrrrrrape. Click... click... BEEP.
The resonant tone cut through the darkness like a torchstone, and through the years he saw Cid's face, wild with triumph...
You bastard...
"Fran, I... I know that noise..."
"Shhh, Ffamran."
"Damn you to hell, woman, that isn't my name!"
His voice echoed strangely off of the glass and metal walls in the distance. The rebound was warped, stretched, melancholy. He hated the sound of it with every fiber of his being. As he slumped back onto the railing he began to tremble; at length he realized he was sweating, soaked to the skin. His teeth rattled against each other.
"Did you not hear me before? You have a fever. Lie still... Wait here."
"Fran... please, F...F...Fran, I'm sorry, listen... Th ... The scraping... It's..."
Her voice came again, a little farther away this time.
"You must lie still. I shall return. Sleep, Fo'e."
"Th...The..."
"Sleep."
He saw the spell just before it hit him, blossoming silver-green like the leaf of a succulent before his eyes, promising oblivion. He tried to resist, tried to call to her, but her aim was sure and he fell into a new kind of darkness, greeted by dreams of cold metal spheres scraping through the blackness beyond.
--
THREE
--
"And now, in stillness, the true terror comes. O, Grandfather! How fierce the despair of solitude."
-- Pheristho's Tales, Ch. 18: Kianan Rises
Clickclickclickclickclick whrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
He opened his eyes and was irritated to find that no light or color greeted him.
He couldn't move his right arm anymore. Something had gone wrong with it, he was sure, but he couldn't imagine what. He couldn't smell infection, but it had gone numb and hung like deadweight at his side.
"And now, in stillness, the true terror comes," He murmured, half-smiling at the dark humor of his misfortune.
He tore open a packet of remedy with his teeth and poured it into his canteen, tainting the last of their clean water with it. She wouldn't approve, but what was the harm, really? If it meant he would be able to use his arm again eventually, he wouldn't mind any unsavory side-effects that overdosing might have. Besides, an overabundance of remedy had never killed a man... had it? He would have to ask Fran if she knew of such a thing.
Idly, he wondered whether the beautiful creature was awake; he raised his head.
"Fran?"
Silence. He longed for the cool plane of her hand on his cheek again...
"Fran, nin'voth, fo'e? Ueth'a nin zhis, se."
When she did not reply he felt around himself carefully. He crawled a meter or two and encountered a small pile of potion bottles; they were full.
She was gone. She had left him there.
"No... Please, my heart," he whispered. "Please."
He picked up one of the potions and clutched it in both hands.
Click... click... BEEP.
He pressed the cool surface of the potion bottle against one of his eyes to soothe its burning; a tear slipped from the other.
"O! Grandfather," he murmured, but he could not finish the stanza.
--
FOUR
--
"Th'illusion of salvation is the cruelest wound a man can bear."
-- Pheristho's Tale, Ch. 47: Jikada's Plea
Time passed.
"Ffamran! Can you hear me?"
He opened his eyes; the voice was not one he recognized offhand.
"Ffamran!"
Was that Zargabaath?
Muffled, echoing somewhere below, came the voice of another, thick with the drawl of Archadia's middle-class.
"Your Honour!"
Yes, Zargabaath and his unit. About bloody time.
"...Here..."
"Ffamran!"
"I'm here..."
And then the flash of a torchstone in the blackness below him –
"Balthier!"
The Princess...?
He sat up and listened as hard as he could.
"Balthier, where are you?"
Please, please, tell me you've found Fran...
"Princess! I'm here! Here! Damn it, I'm above you! The..."
The voices came again, further away this time.
"Your Honour!"
"Balthier? Please, Balthier!"
Too parched to shout again, muscles aching, he awkwardly wrenched Fomalhaut from its holster with his good arm and banged it as hard as he could against the railing.
Clang. Clang. Clang. Clang.
"Here, damn you!"
But he did not see the torchstone again.
After he had counted out five minutes of silence, he lay back down on the catwalk and clutched Fomalhaut to his chest.
"I should have known it wouldn't be that simple..."
Clickclickclickclickclickclickclick... Thump. Thump. Clank... Clank... Clank.
--
FIVE
--
Time passed.
And Edyn Spake; 'Though this hell be mine, I flee from it. Tell all who revile me that which I have done.'
Balthier had reached his favourite passage in Pheristho's Epic; he closed his eyes and savored the words, feeling Edyn's pain as surely as his own. He shifted his weight and curled slowly into a fetal ball, his stomach in knots. He was about to faint with hunger; the taste of a potion was still in his mouth, but his canteen was dry.
"Take heart, my friend, in knowing this: I yet love the cursed world I lost, And this - sweet oblivion - is my reward."
Balthier ran his fingers along the barrel of Fomalhaut; she was pleasantly smooth, comfortingly heavy, sweetly lethal.
Whrrrrrrrr... fzzt. Clank.
He would have to use her soon. The undead were likely to rise sooner or later, and come looking for him; a search party of a different stripe.
Would he be able to take aim by sound alone? Would he be able to ferret the right pouch of shot from his pack? If he accidentally loaded his rifle with dark shot, he'd never make it out alive.
Fran would be among them... he would hear her coming. Would he find the strength to shoot her before she tore him to pieces?
He squeezed his eyes closed against the impenetrable blackness.
"And lo, in the burned lands below Paradise, the cursed Edyn soared; he fell; he died."
--
SIX
--
"For Vegona I fall, and may her wings catch me, wretched mother, deathly hallowed woman who bore and reviled me! O Mother, I die!"
-- Pheristho's Tale, ch. 52: The Fallen Child
Time passed.
Balthier dropped the last empty potion bottle off the catwalk and listened to it bounce off the twisted remains of paths and rails below. Rasler's ring had grown heavy in his pocket. He could hear Ashe's voice in his head, muddled and indistinct.
"You mustn't die, Balthier... Please don't die!"
"I'm sorry, princess."
His chest tightened at the thought of her; he had heard her weeping over the communicator, her voice tender and strained with fear. Had she loved him, truly? Would he ever really know if she loved him or not? Not that it mattered. Fran was dead; he had no heart remaining to give. He was no more than a dead man himself now.
Fran...
He bit his cheek hard until he tasted blood, and rocked his head back and forth, slowly. He was trying, if in vain, to push her from his mind. The dead cannot hear the living, and pirates never mourn. He would carry on without her.
Somehow.
Eventually, he fell asleep. His dreams were like liquid, muddling into one another, swirling round one another. The Nethcite... Venat... Gerun... Zecht... Vayne... Cid...
He woke in a flash when he felt something move beside him. He waited, listened.
"Are you quite satisfied?" He finally asked, hoarsely.
Silence greeted him. He smiled, and felt his parched lips crack with the effort.
"Of course you don't have anything to say to me. Why would you? I'm just collateral in this whole fiasco."
Grimly satisfied that he'd made his point, he closed his eyes.
Scrape... skritch... clank...fzzt.
"I didn't think your little army of rooks would survive the crash. But there you are... ever your ingenuity at work. They've killed her, I presume? Aren't you proud of yourself... Even without you around to tell them what to do, they know to torture me evermore, you horrid bastard!"
His fury bounced off the walls and chased itself around the corridor. He drew Fomalhaut from its holster again, pressed the muzzle to his cheek.
"If I pull the trigger, will you be angry with me?"
Silence. He scoffed into the blackness. His hand began to shake, and the muzzle of Fomalhaut shivered against his cheekbone.
"If I had stayed, it wouldn't have mattered. I still would have hated you. Ah..."
He chuckled weakly.
"It's mad, isn't it, how we've spent all these years hating each other..."
He grit his teeth.
"It ends here."
When he pulled the trigger, nothing happened.
--
SEVEN
--
"And darkness came. The graves were silhouetted black on black, and one remained, sole wretched child of the Aeon's disgrace."
-- Pheristho's Tale, Ch. 80
Ffamran wept.
--
EIGHT
--
"My miracle is thee, sweet ghost, for though you are dead, I am with you. You grace me with your touch, and I am whole again."
Pheristho's Tale, Ch. 82
He lay quite still on the catwalk, tracing with his finger the little lines it had pressed into his cheek as he slept.
The water was gone. The potions were gone. His rifle was gone. Fran was dead. There was nothing left to be done. The princess had forgotten him. The Imperials' mastiffs would have found him and killed him by now, but they were surely all dead. He was alone, and to make matters worse, the wraiths had taken the last of his supplies. The wraiths, with their empty leering helm-faces and gauntleted hands tearing at his clothes, plucking at his earrings, shouting soundlessly at him in their pain and anger.
All because of you, Bunansa. All because of you.
He rolled onto his back and began banging on the steel catwalk with his fist in a slow, even rhythm.
Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.
The sound of his fist crashing into the steel made him smile. It was something to think about, something to focus on other than the dreadful blackness that had seeped into his bones, and the voices of the dead that hissed in his mind.
"You can have me when I'm dead, you bastards. You won't have to wait long. Leave. Me. Alone."
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Clank... clank... clank... clank.
The sound was much closer than it had been before. Small, strange, ominous. The rooks had found him. It would all be over soon.
He moaned with relief at the thought of death; the pace of the sound doubled.
Clank-clank-clank-clank-clank.
Balthier closed his eyes and banged ever harder on the catwalk with his fist, waiting for the merciful flash of all-encompassing pain that meant a rook had finally slain him.
Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.
The clanking stopped and he heard a voice, sweet and musical, wrenched with sorrow.
"Aii, Ffamran, Fo'e, sweet Ffamran. Stop. Please stop."
He closed his eyes and shook his head fervently. The voice was too lovely, too tender. It was all a lie; they were taunting him now.
"Don't, damn you, don't... Please... Kill me. Please!"
"Balthier, Fo'e. Te, te, te, te... Oh, sweet child, sweet love. Hush."
He curled tightly into himself, terrified. "No... no!"
But then he heard a slight rustle, and then a hand, smooth and cool, found its way to his cheek, bringing with it the scent of sandalwood.
It couldn't be.
"Fran...?"
"I left you too long. Oh, Balthier. A'tjur, tr'noth..."
"Fran!"
Only then did he notice the pain; his left hand was bruised to the bone, and his heart pounded furiously in his chest as though it would burst.
He sat up in one quick, jerky movement. The motion sent pain through every atrophied muscle in his body, but the agony was nothing to the sweetness of her arms around him as she lay his tearstained cheek to her breast.
"Ffamran, I am here. Ffamran. Hush... drink."
Her fingertips skimmed his lips, and he kissed them; then the neck of her canteen found his mouth and he drank, a slight trickle of sweet tepid water that opened his throat and made him laugh brokenly with relief, rocking back and forth in her arms like a child. After a long moment of savoring her presence he moved away from her, allowing himself a little distance from her sandalwood skin and gentle thrumming heartbeat. In place of curling against her, he reached out with tender trembling fingers and stroked her cheek.
"I thought you were dead... The rooks..."
"I evaded their detection easily enough. Aii, you are cold. Eat this..."
After a moment's fumbling, she pressed a piece of something soft and strong-smelling into his hand. He sighed thickly with gratitude; he had never enjoyed the contemptible smell of smoked rabbit meat, but the jerky would taste like heaven on earth after days of nothing but remedy-muddled water and the occasional potion. He took a small, tentative bite and sighed again, overwhelmed by the dark, smoky, salty tang of the stuff. It was, he admitted to himself, the most wonderful thing he'd ever tasted.
She gently took his hand from her cheek and got to her feet. He heard her shoes clank against the catwalk, and scoffed at himself for having thought such a lovely sound could bring with it his demise.
"I have found the way out, but it is far," she said in her low, musical voice.
"The way out..." He murmured, around his mouthful of food. The words confused him.
"Yes, fo'e. You can stand?"
He swallowed the bite of meat reluctantly, frowned to himself. He hadn't heard her correctly.
"The... the way out?"
"Eih, the way out. Did I not tell you I smelled rain? Get up, Ffamran. I will lead you."
He slowly curled into himself, rocked up onto his knees.
"Officious," he whispered, but he was smiling.