A/N: Welcome, Dear Readers! Thank you for taking the time to click on this story. I just want to say something real quick before you get started.

This is not a sequel, but rather a companion novel to "A Song for the Past" and "For A Moment's Peace," which means that it is not necessary to have read either of those to enjoy this one. Also, I don't believe it is necessary to have played FFXII, since this story takes place so long after the events of the game ended. This is one of those stories more original than fanfiction.

FFXII, Revenant Wings and the unreleased Fortress

© Square Enix

When asked why she hadn't apprenticed to the bangaa, Sari always said that healing didn't pay the bills.

"We've got a live one here," Marjn shouted, but speaking at that decibel wasn't unusual around dinnertime in the Whitecap and Sari barely heard her. Besides, whenever Marjn used a hume expression, her delivery was that of a two-bit mummer on a penny stage.

Sari didn't have time to decipher Marjn's odd word choice right then. "Who had the shepherd's pie?" she called across table fifteen, holding her tray high above the heads of the people gathered there. She had to repeat the question over the talk and laughter, but a sky pirate on the far side looked up and realized – or remembered, depending on how empty her tankard was – it was she and raised her hand. Sari slid the hot crock of lamb, vegetables, and potato in front of her, distributing the other dishes as quickly as she named them and the diners claimed them.

Sari had been waiting tables at the Whitecap for the past three years, and she was good at it, which was why she got the good tips. Daggers and pocket knives appeared from waistcoat pockets, hip sheaths, and boot tops; it wasn't expected for establishments to provide weapons with a meal. Sari tucked her tray under her arm, pulled spoons rolled in cloth napkins out of her apron pockets, and gave her customers her best smile. "Anything else I can bring you gents? No? Just give me a wave if you need anything, then."

She set a miniature flag stand in the middle of the crowded table, smiled again, and turned around, ready to dash back to the kitchen for the next round.

And promptly ran into Marjn, who was standing right behind her.

"Ouch – Mare! What are you doing?" Sari exclaimed. The Whitecap, located on the bay in Balfonheim Port, was a haunt for adventurers, hunters, and pirates of all races, who weren't exactly known for patience. Tonight was no exception. The two lasses had split the tables of the upper floor. Little flags waved in the smoky air by the windows. One of them, held aloft by a tatty-eared moogle with black circles in the white fur around his eyes, was signaling something rude in semaphore. The size of a small child, the moogle hovered a few inches off his chair, tiny bat wings whirring, the orange pompon sprouting from his skull cap bobbing. Sari tilted her head in his direction and added, "Tables one, five, and six want you."

"Isn't that Jothaniel?" Marjn shouted calmly. She pointed a long, claw-hard nail toward the door.

Before Sari could answer, a diner shoved his chair into her, catching her painfully in the lower back. He jumped up, shouting apologies. Sari directed him toward the lavatory with a winning smile, assuring him she was fine. Which she would be if Marjn would get out of her way.

The adventurer squeezed between the two women, his gaze lingering appreciatively on Marjn's cleavage, which was level with his eyes. The space between the tables was limited, which was why Leena had instructed her wait staff never to stand around flirting. A bruise wasn't worth a broken heart because no lad courted a waitress longer than it took to get her in his bunk. They'd all learned this lesson at least once. For the practical ones, that was the end of it. The romantic ones, like Nikki, clothed their bruises with naked hope. Watching Nikki flirt with increasing desperation made Sari sick to her stomach.

"I don't know if it's him or not. Look, Mare –" Another flag popped up like a hare out of its burrow, this time at table eleven, one of hers. "Jon knows I'm working tonight. I'll talk to him later."

Marjn turned large, reddish eyes on her. She'd dyed her naturally silver hair to match. Soft, auburn waves framed her dusky face. "Grench is talking to him right now," she said.

Nothing much ever fazed a viera, but something in Marjn's tone made Sari squint toward the front door.

Not that she could see a thing. She wasn't very tall. Especially compared to Marjn in her seven-inch stilettos. Sari held the back of her skirt down with one hand and jumped a couple of times to get a better view. Marjn put her hand on her hip to watch, her long, leporine, auburn-dyed ears tilted forward in amusement.

It was Jothaniel. His flaxen hair was hard to miss amid so many dark-haired Archadians. Helm under his arm, face sweat-streaked and dirty, he gestured as he spoke, a sure sign of agitation.

Grench, arms folded on top of his protruding belly, shirt front stained from his hours in the kitchen, blocked the way further into the tavern, getting redder in the face. Going past red. Purpling. Another sure sign of agitation.

Sensing an explosion, Sari ducked. She pushed Marjn toward her customers and then scurried over to table eleven. Grench complained nightly about Marjn's lack of urgency and blamed it on the natural flightiness of empty female minds. The last thing Sari wanted to do was go down there and confront Jothaniel, which would give Grench a clear shot at her. Her boss was a chauvinistic baknamy at times, yes, but waiting tables was good pay, and it wasn't like he abused any of them. Maybe if Sari kept Marjn working, she could avoid most of the blast. Maybe.

"Hello, gents, sorry about the wait," she said cheerily, meeting the eyes of all four patrons in turn. That always won them over. Eye contact. Smiles. High energy. Ready answers to every question. The components of an elixir that yielded good gil, every time. "What can I get for you?"

Even though she didn't have Marjn's sensitive ears, she could hear the disturbance at the door growing. She put her back to it, leaning on the uneven resin tabletop to hear her customer's orders better. Years ago, Grench had built the tables out of driftwood, hemp, steel bolts, and old beer kegs. They were sturdy enough to weather the fiercest brawls.

Disappointingly, the order was small. Two pilsners, a lager, and an ale, plus a plate of cheese pierogis and one of potato. Sari was busy upselling Grench's buy-one-get-one entrée special when the wooden door burst inward and slammed against the stone wall hard enough to put a stop to conversation in the entire pub. Then talk started up again like a rainstorm approaching shore, louder than before.

Sari stared. So did Grench, his thick, hairy arms slack at his sides, as Jothaniel elbowed him aside and conducted four other filthy adventurers in. She recognized Daq, Savin, Eagrin, and Twitch. Propped between them, a fifth adventurer in full plate that she didn't know was out cold, his beardless face smeared with gore.

Sari stood, rigid with shock, while Jothaniel cleared the nearest table of tankards and ashtrays with a sweep of both arms – scattering the table's cursing, dripping occupants – and directed his friends to put the unconscious hume on it. Twitch seemed to be clutching a bundle of cloth and weapons that weren't his, backed into a corner like a spooked cockatrice; Eagrin and Savin began removing the stranger's armor; Jothaniel whipped a towel out of Nikki's hands, plunged it into a pitcher of water, and started mopping blood with it. Unsurprisingly, Daq picked up one of the fallen tankards and upended it over his wide, snaggle-toothed maw. The lad on the table never stirred. His blood pooled on the greasy, beery floorboards.

Sure enough, Mt. Grench blew.

"Sari!"

This time, it was much harder holding her smile as she turned back to her customers. Putting her hands together in apology, she said, "It looks like something's come up, gents, madam. I'll send Nikki with those drinks for you, but she might be a moment. And to thank you for your understanding, your ticket will be on me. How does that sound?"

"Well, brown sugar, how about throwing in some fruit pasties while you're at it?" one of the men asked, grinning.

She made a face. She hated that nickname. Greedy unoriginal bas-

"SARI!"

"Excuse me," she gasped, and bolted. She may not have been as leggy as a viera, but she was an active sort of person, and she'd learned the hip swish necessary for navigating the crowded tavern in a skirt long ago. Her regulars shouted encouragement and questions, which she ignored. Taking the stairs two at a time, she tried to calculate her earnings from the last two weeks in her head. She'd been pulling double shifts lately. Four beers, two pierogi plates, and a couple of pasties? She should still have enough for this month's rent. Probably. Especially since she suspected Jothaniel, as usual, didn't have two gil to rub together.

Whoever this charity case was, he'd better be worth it.

She snagged Nikki by her puffed sleeve, pleading with her in a half-shout to cover her tables. After glaring a moment, the other lass rolled her eyes and stomped up the stairs.

"Be grateful I've already earned your tips for you. It's the most gil you'll see in a month!" Sari yelled after her. Then Grench reached her.

Too angry for a prolonged speech, her boss put a thick-fingered hand on her shoulder and ground out, "Get . . . rid . . . now," through his beard before he disappeared behind the bar. At least he hadn't fired her outright. Leena, his wife, slipped into the crowd, applying damage control with a basket of fresh rolls and a crock of butter. Sari didn't see why. Fifty or so health code violations aside, their customers were loving the scene. Quite a line had built up, ordering enough beer to drown a behemoth as they gawked through the open door and windows.

"Jon! What the hell do you think you're doing?" Sari hissed, coming up behind him.

"Found him in the Uplands," Jothaniel grunted in his blunt Dalmascan accent. "He's in a bad way, Sari. He needs help."

"So you brought him here?" Curiosity got the better of her. She edged closer, peering down at the unconscious lad. "This is a tavern, you blockhead. People eat here! What's wrong with the healer, for crying out loud?"

Jothaniel grabbed her wrist with a sopping, bloody glove, his gray eyes intense. "Leapin' Bangaa is too far. He needs you."

Sari held his gaze. Then she sighed and nodded. She wasn't going to turn away a hume in need, not even if it meant she might lose her job. Maybe Grench would have grown a heart by the time she got Jothaniel and the others out of there.

"All right, boyos, get that shirt off him," she said briskly. "And someone tell Daq he has to pay for that."

"What?" the seeq choked into the newest rescued tankard. Hoppy bubbles dripped from his upturned snout and double chin, and he clutched a pasty oozing sea berries in his claws. "It was on the floor!"

"Way to keep it classy, Daq," Savin rumbled.

"Shut it," Daq returned, shoving the rest of the pasty in his mouth. He dug sourly around in the bejeweled pouch at his waist, half hidden in the overhang of his bare, foam-white belly.

Chuckling, Sari shook her head and focused on her patient.

He was young, three or four years past her twenty. At first, as the lads worked on clearing away the remaining bits of armor and clothing, she studied him in a detached sort of way. She'd never seen hair quite that color before, the dark gold of ripe wheat, and there was a lot of it, snarled to his waist. Ha, this boyo had more hair than she did. It was nothing like hers, which was matte black and launched out of her scalp in short spirals no bigger around than her littlest finger. She'd been wrong about his face, too: he wore a sparse, yellow-white goatee, his sideburns neatly trimmed.

She cocked her head. He was handsome. And strong, to have carried around that ridiculous, expensive plate armor. Normally, she didn't like her men that pale; for years, she'd harbored a crush on Savin, black as velvet and bulky as a mountain, but had never acted on it. Which was probably for the best. But now, as her hands explored the seeping wound in the stranger's gut, she thought she liked the contrast of her dark fingers against his warm, peachy skin.

"Serpent?" she asked in her most professional voice. Even as she said it, she knew her guess was incorrect. The teeth marks that had savaged this lad were too wide and numerous to belong to a serpent, which only had three sets of forward-growing fangs. Crushing dinner into paste wasn't precisely a serpent's style. She began picking pieces of plate out of the ugly holes, gently realigning severed muscle and skin.

Jothaniel and Eagrin exchanged a look, and it was Eagrin who spoke through a flop of nappy black hair. "It was a tarasque. That's what we were after today."

"You're going to have to give me more information than that," she said, trying not to breathe too deeply. Blood gave off an overpoweringly sickening smell, especially in these kinds of quantities. Her hands were more red than brown now, slick and shiny.

"Rare game," Jothaniel admitted, earning himself a glare from Sari. "It's a type of toad. We were clearing the area of lizards when this guy showed up, alone. Unfortunately, the tarasque got to him before we could warn him. It pulled him right off his chocobo."

Sari groaned inwardly. The mark had been big, then. Chocobos weren't exactly the chickens in the barnyard. Trust Jothaniel to get someone into a scrape of this sort.

"Why don't you get a real job instead of bringing me your messes to put back together?" she muttered, her eyes full of the blue glow of curing magick. Truth be told, she was a talented mage, but healing just didn't pay the bills. Not when she tended to give her skills away for free. Kind of like now. It was beyond daft to expect her sweet, gullible, make-it-rich-quick friend to afford this sort of healing. Which was why she was in this pickle in the first place. She sighed again, returning her mind to the task at hand. "Doesn't seem like it was poisonous, but there's some spinal damage. This might take a minute. Back off, will you?"

If there was one person that all hunters and adventurers respected, it was a healer. They did as she asked. She put them and the rest of the Whitecap out of her head.

The Mist, the twinkling power of magick that infused every rock and stone of Ivalice, was slippery and uneven here, subject to the tides and the season. The elementals who called Cerobi Steppe home for half the year were missing, migrated to islands deep in the Naldoan Sea. Still, enough Mist was present for this job. She called it in, harnessed it, and shaped it with glowing sigils that she drew on the air. The ravaged body beneath her hands gradually relaxed and the breathing evened out. She restored lost blood, fixed broken bones, reattached muscle and tendon, and closed torn skin. She lowered the fever and boosted the production of endorphins and other natural painkillers.

She felt the strain when it was done. Jothaniel caught her when her knees gave out. They stared at the figure on the table.

Who opened his eyes, which turned out to be a startling shade of leaf green.

A/N: Please review, and let me know what you think! :3 Also, I will return the review, because I'm always on the lookout for great stories!

Humbly Yours,

Anne