Classification
aethere.
A/N: AU. A lot of made-up theory on viera. Don't believe a word that's said about them. Takes place post-game. Re-uploaded due to a mistake pointed out in a review from fluidstatic.
(Psst, you should go and read her work. She's a wonderful writer.)
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"Balthier."
"Yes?"
"How many years?"
"What do you mean?"
"How many?"
Then? Silence.
-
Sometimes, Balthier thinks that he must be dreaming. Fran is a goddess in her own right, after all. She shouldn't be allowed to stand by someone like him, to stand by, walking the shadows so that he could feel the light. And if not for that reason, if not because he loves her, then because she is as beautiful as any one of her race - not because he's seen so few he can't tell the ugly from the blessed, but because she truly deserves the recognition. The Mother herself is scandalized at the way he looks on at her children. In her mind, old and withered, they are all pure save for the occasional outcast. They should remain pure. This man called Balthier only stands as an obstacle to the ultimate example of female piety. This is what the Mother has set out to create...the ultimate glorification of beauty untainted by sin.
Balthier can commit every sin she's ever thought of several times over with little more than flinching. His only weaknesses, she surmises, are the ties he has to the world. They come in the form of people she would delight in strangling, yet it is Balthier himself who desires to cut his past away so much that he would willing sacrifice all of them, even the father he hates that is twice as powerful as he is. How long until Fran dies as well?
She fears to know the answer.
And when they come back to Eruyt, the first of her small portions of utopia and therefore the most flawed, she is sad to find that not only is Fran their leader's companion - this Balthier she now despises - but she already bears the marks of death upon her. Her eyes, once colorless, have taken on a demonic hue of red. The fake lifeline cut into her palm is fading, rubbing away like ink from old paper. There are other signs that only the Mother can see, but these two things are enough for her children. They shy away from her and pay Fran only the minimal of respects. Balthier assumes that it is because Fran is scorned by her kind, as the (mortal) outcast she has become, not because they fear that the scent and feeling of half-death will rub off if they even so much as make eye contact with her.
None do.
When one of her children, the friend-to-the-cripple, asks for their help, this sole viera is the only one with a strong enough stomach for death to come near Fran at all. Even then, she keeps at least three paces away, and never dares to stand in her shadow at all. Most viera, if anyone takes care to notice, lack them.
By then, Fran's eyes have tainted themselves a few shades of crimson darker than before. They are a great deal stronger than her originally opaque irises. They are more noticeable, much wiser, and less afraid of death than ever.
Surely, the old forest spirit thinks, she must already know.
At night, the viera in Eruyt feel lifelines bleed Mist, and all of the Green Word's fatherless children writhe in nightmares that threaten to rip apart their very souls. They never speak of them during the day, but the devoted ones know that the outcasts suffer no such sorrow. The devoted ones pretend that is a lie, ousting the ones that voice their doubt. For their loyalty to her, remaining chaste virgins and relying on her mercy for their very lives, knowing that those dark nights filled with fear and sweat are what they must endure to come into the light, the Mother gives these children (her children, denouncing the rest) immortality.
She supposes that Balthier cannot know this. Or if he can, Fran has chosen not to tell him. Perhaps Fran has retained some of her restraint and kept to at least a few of the vieran laws she'd devised. Often, the Mother knew, Fran was too fickle to decide whether it was worth her time. Generally, the Mother had similar thoughts about the viera themselves. The viera were her crown glory, on top of the spirits no one saw anymore and the Espers no one acknowledged.
And yet, she was what the legends were all about.
-
After Eruyt, with its cringing inhabitants and graceful expanse of wood-sky, Fran looked in the mirror for the first time in twenty years. Most of the time, because she and Balthier shared the same bathroom, it was her partner's face that occupied it. When it didn't, Fran found that she was too afraid to raise her eyes up so that her puppet companion did the same. The mirror stayed a mystery much of the time. Balthier never questioned it. He simply assumed she already knew she was beautiful and left it at that.
(Poor Balthier, never to know. No. He mustn't.)
That first time in two decades, almost a quarter of a century, was not by any momentous decision on Fran's part. Her eyes simply slipped as they never had before; they were bound to, once in a while, whether it was to the claw marks she made on Balthier's back every other night...or (this time) to the blood-red pupils in the mirror.
She recoiled with little difficulty; a little gasp, dainty enough not to draw Balthier's immediate attention, managed to squeeze the air out of her lungs. Left compressed, they were crushed against her ribs beneath the bare flesh, stripped clean the night before by Balthier's lecherous eyes, along with the dirt and clean and everything else. He barely let his eyes go her way, afraid she would dissolve, composed of only the bits leftover from the previous night.
Fran's hands clenched and her body screamed apocalypse as it slumped to the ground.
Her head collided with the unsheathed razor - Balthier's - lying precariously on the edge of the sink. Her blood leaked to the bottom of the sink; it mixed with the water so easily it might never have been blood at all.
-
It took little more than a single, infinite moment in time for Balthier to realize what had happened.
This was mainly because that was how long it took him to move toward her, to cry out in a panic and touch her temples, drenched in blood, slender thief's fingers coming away slick with the liquid.
This was mainly because he had had no idea that she was going to die that day, and in that way.
Why?
Of course.
Because she had never told him.
With a streak of bitterness trailing down his cheek, Balthier holds Fran close.
She didn't tell him - but she should have.
Didn't she know he would have saved her, or had she simply not cared?
-
Contrary to popular belief, viera do not die. Viera fade.
They lose the remnants of humanity and sanity, their once virginal white bodies fading to darker and more sinful colors along with those things.
Viera, born with lifelines the only dark marks on their skin, and with colorless translucent eyes like clouds on their equally pale faces, lose these qualities as they age and grow better acquainted with mortality. Their hair, as fair as snow, changes no matter what, turning silver in their old age like a human's, but if they remain close to the Mother as they should, their eyes never turn from white to red to empty, and their skin never grows as dark as a summer night, nor does their blood run red - rather as white as the rest of them, pure in their tranquil innocence as Fran was not.
And finally, it is then that Balthier realizes this.
But in his eyes, that does not make Fran any less innocent.