Note: This story was originally written for the Secret Santa fic exchange at the leading_men community on livejournal. If you want, you can go there and read the complete story at any time (although you need to join the group to see it)! But over here I'm going to be posting it in parts, a chapter a day, instead of putting it all in a giant hunk with the chapters seperated by break marks the way it is over there.
The only difference, aside from being broken into chapters, is that a couple of scenes will be mildly edited to fit the ratings rules here.
The first thing that hit Vaan when he saw the empty hanger where the Strahl should have been was fear. The main thing that he, that they, had left of Balthier, and of Fran, was gone. It was gone, and it was his fault, because he'd chosen to rent a hanger that he knew he'd still be able to scrape up enough gil to afford even after the money he'd made by collecting loot and taking hunts all the way from The Feywood to Archades ran out. Because he hadn't had enough faith that the sky pirates would eventually return to rent one that he'd only be able to rent for a year or two but which would be near impossible to break into, and because he'd been too proud to ask Ashe to keep it where the few royal airships had once been housed when watching over it was supposed to be his responsibility.
Because he'd been willing--even in this small way, even though the thought made bile rise up in the back of his throat and his heart splinter and seep in the spot that had only just begun to heal from the pain of Reks' death--to give up on them.
The fear had given way to a fierce, uncontrollable, joy when he'd spotted the letter attached to one of the light crystals and realized what it meant. Anyone in the Aerodrome close enough to their hanger to hear him and Penelo then had probably thought they'd gone mad, with the way they'd whooped and whirled and danced wildly across the empty room, one moment laughing so hard they could barely stand, the next hovering on the edge of bursting into sloppy, giddy, tears. All Vaan could think, again and again, was 'He's alive, he's alive, he's alive,' that single train of thought only faltering when he guiltily realized it should be 'they're alive.'
That night, for the first time in ages, he and Penelo snuck into the palace so they could drag Ashe off to celebrate with them. For just a few hours everything was back to the way it had been a year before, happiness erasing every trace of the new distance that had grown between her and them in that time.
It wasn't until the middle of the night, when he was lying in bed finally beginning to calm down, that his emotions shifted for the last time. "Wait a minute..." he said, staring up at the ceiling of his room, the way Balthier had chosen to communicate with them finally really sinking in. "A note? He leaves us thinking they might be dead for a year, and when he finally decides to let us know they're okay all he does is leave a stupid note? No way is he getting away with that!"
He was on his feet and out the door almost before he knew what he was doing, the anger that washed through him at the thought propelling him towards the city's east gate. He knew that Fran and Balthier probably would have taken the Strahl off to the middle of nowhere if they were trying to hide out for some reason, but with a year of sky piracy under his belt he'd picked up enough slyness to realize it was just as likely that they would have counted on him thinking that and laughed their way to another Aerodrome assuming he'd never think to check it. Anyway, he needed some place to start looking, and there was a lot more wide-open spaces in the world than there were Aerodromes, so Nalbina it was.