Disclaimer: All belongs to Square Enix.
Firefly
When they bring him in through the alleys of the fortress, going down – down – down – he is dreaming of the Princess. ("Would this make her the Queen now?" he thinks, far off in a corner of his mind.) It is an especially odd dream to be having when one is about to die, he decides, brushing away the foliage of Dalmasca's royal gardens dreamscape. The sun is out shining far above him as he lounges in the cool shade of the small assortment of trees, the Princess' childish laughter ringing in the air somewhere close. He attempts to move apart the branches blocking his view that suddenly seem too big for the trunks, but they refuse to falter under his touch – he frowns and peeks through the green instead, searching for the Princess' figure.
He finds her as she dances and spins across the gardens, small and dressed in summer garb all alone with no maid in sight. He tries to move the branches blocking his passage yet again and fails, hissing as they suddenly grow thorns and pierce droplets of blood on his skin. Abruptly, he returns his gaze to the hole in the leaves and searches for the Princess – she's standing before a slumped body on an out-of-place throne that wasn't there before, her back to him. Her voice betrays her body and she's clad in her wedding gown, her hands splattered with something dark. He begins to back away, eyes wide, but something behind him snaps – the Princess turns away from the dead body of her father, face fierce and twisted in anger as her gaze finds his, and whispers,
"Traitor."
On the seventh day of his imprisonment, he opens his eyes through the fog clogging his head to find his own face staring back at him. They stare at each other for a few moments, just looking, before the face that's not his opens his mouth and says, "Your Princess is dead now, Basch. Tell me, what is it like, to be a dead man serving a dead Queen?"
The impostor with the face and the voice leaves in a loud clink of armour and shuffle of cloak when it is obvious that the man hanging in the cage will not answer him. The silence stretches, interrupted by the scurrying of mice, and Basch eventually hangs his head and closes his eyes.
The ghost haunting him will not let him die.
A small part of him – the one that is striving to live, to break free of these chains and escape, is glad for this. "What will you do even if you manage to leave this blasted place?" He asks himself, hungry for any sort of answer from his dying conscience, but none comes. Many times he swears that he can hear footsteps, light against the pavement, but when he looks up there is no one there; just a flicker of movement in the corner of his eyes and then she's there, staring at him, eyes burning with hatred.
They stare at each other for days on end, the madman and the hallucination, and he doesn't need this beautiful ghost to open her lips to form the word he already has echoing inside his mind.
"Traitor."
Somewhere between lunacy and starvation, a crazy thought finds its way into his mind and he begins to wonder if the Princess is alive in the way that he is dead. Images of her locked up, beaten and broken and tarnished just like he is fill his mind – he chases them away and wishes for the ghost to grace him with her presence, the picture perfect image of pristine skin and pale ash hair. (he doesn't admit it but it brings peace to his frenzied mind.)
Her slap stings his cheek, her eyes bore into his with animosity and the air rings with her yells – yet all he wants to do is snatch that hand away from her breast and hold it close to his, relishing in the fact that she is no longer a figment of his imagination but alive and well and just as innocent as he remembers her to be.
Two years is a long time for a dead Princess to rise into a dead Queen, his mind murmurs as he takes in her face, and his heart sinks.