Balthier had never been so cold in the whole of his life. But the Paramina Rift boasted some of the harshest climes in all of Ivalice, and he had ever been wont to seek out warmer locales, preferring the temperate warmth of Balfonheim or the lush humidity of the Golmore Jungle to the frigid, thin air that graced the valley surrounding Mt. Bur-Omisace. Even the Sands, the vast deserts surrounding Rabanastre on all sides, would have been preferable to the cold that seemed to seep into his bones, shriveling joints and tendons until they screamed in agony.
He had not been alone in his misery. Blue lips and frostbitten fingertips abounded. Fran's ears had frozen over, their fur matted and stiff. Grainy crystals of ice collected upon armor, creating swirling fractal patterns that he might have found beautiful had he not been just so bloody freezing.
Ashe shielded her eyes from the spray of snow and sleet that drifted down the valley. Basch had given up all pretense of stalwart forbearance, holding his massive shield like a debutante would a parasol. Vaan had surreptitiously stuck himself in Fran's wake, letting her take the brunt of the storm. Penelo merely frolicked.
Insulated by the thick leather of her jumpsuit, she was vastly unaffected by the temperature. Of course, her lips had gone blue and feathery threads of ice had clumped upon her lashes, the added weight giving her eyes a rather slumberous appearance - but the brisk wind had burnished her cheeks with pink, and her hair was rather charmingly decorated with a fine layer of snow. Her hair was so pale that the snow blended somewhat, except for those bright sparkling glints in the light whenever she moved, as though she'd been showered in diamonds.
She looked like a damned snow fairy, her eyes lustrous and vivid against the stark white backdrop of the snowdrifts. Though the bitter wind had to sting her face she didn't give it any consideration. Not when there were snow flurries to catch on her tongue, a perpetual grin lingering at the corners of her mouth. Her breath fogged in the air with each attempt; she missed a particularly large flake that landed instead upon the tip of her nose and went briefly cross-eyed as she stared at it until it melted at last.
An outcropping in the massive rock walls provided shelter against the wind; everyone but Penelo had hurried beneath it, eager to set up camp and avoid the glacial air.
"Penelo." Ashe's voice was a harsh, dry croak - their water had frozen solid, and none of them had had anything to drink for hours. "Haven't you any gloves? Your fingers look rather frozen."
"What would I need gloves for?" Penelo asked absently, catching a snowflake on the pad of her index finger. "No call for them in Rabanastre."
Balthier chided, "In the absence of a clear direction, it's wise to pack for all climates."
A careless shrug; she had dropped to her knees, scooping up handfuls of the pristine, fluffy snow, letting it drift through her fingers. "It's just like sand, but it's just the opposite of it. Like a frozen desert."
With the way the snow continued to pile up, reminiscent of dunes, Balthier could certainly understand why she thought so.
Basch had strung up a couple of hides, further insulating their temporary shelter from snow and wind. Fran had cast a couple down upon the ground as well, so that they would not be laying straight upon hard, cold stone.
Vaan scratched at the nape of his neck, shaking his head at the pile of tinder he'd bundled up beneath a neatly stacked pile of sticks. "Come on, Pen. We have to have a fire, and you've got the flint."
Penelo's face crumpled into a pout, but she came at last, slinging her bag into Vaan's waiting hands as she joined the rest of them in the makeshift shelter. They hadn't collected enough wood to allow for cooking; they would have to burn what they had sparingly and keep the pelts closed to hold in the warmth, relying on dry rations for nourishment, and leaving their canteens close to the fire in the hopes of melting the ice into drinkable water.
And yet Penelo dropped onto her belly, lifting the bottom edge of one of the hides to peek out at the wintery landscape.
"For the gods' sake," Balthier muttered irritably. "You'd think you'd never seen snow before."
"I haven't," she said. "Never been out of Rabanastre. Well, except the Estersands once or twice, just down to the Outpost. But that was before the war." She'd slipped her fingers beneath the hide, drawing patterns in the snow that dusted the ground.
Somehow, her softly spoken reply made Balthier feel small and petty. Not that there'd been any censure in it to make him feel so - but it had simply never occurred to him that anyone might live their entire life in only one place, surrounded on all sides by walls forty feet high, unconquerable, inescapable. She might've read of snow in books, but today was the very first time she'd seen it, felt it, tasted it.
She saw it with new eyes, reveled in the arctic beauty of it - beauty to which he had long since become inured. For him, it was only an annoyance, but for her it was a fairytale, a memory she would hold in her heart forever.
Night fell softly and silently, and the only sound was the wind whistling through the Rift, bouncing off peaks and valleys, fluttering the hides and shoving skirls of snow beneath the edges. And long after light had failed and the fire had been extinguished, Penelo had held out her hand, her fingers dancing with the flakes.
Royal City of Archades, Archadia
Late Summer, 5 New Valendian (marked by the end of the Occuria's reign)
Balthier woke abruptly, jerked out of the dream as he toppled from the bed onto the floor, his limbs arranged in an ungainly sprawl. As he ever seemed to, whenever Fran got it into her head that he had been asleep longer than he ought, and sought to rectify that in her own manner. Which involved not an alarm or a gentle nudge, but rather planting her heel firmly on his back and shoving with all of her might. And, as a viera, she could manage rather a lot of it.
At some point the impression of her spiked heel on the base of his spine was bound to become a permanent indentation.
He floundered upwards from beneath a swath of sheets and blankets, striving for a glare. "Blast it, Fran—that's done it. I'm calling round to have locks put on my door. Three of them, at the very least."
Impassively, she watched him wrestle away the tangled covers, declining to dignify his grumbled assertion with a response. She had never shown the least unease - or even interest - in his state of undress, and they'd been together too many years for him to have retained any missishness where she was concerned. He rather thought she'd appointed herself his guardian of sorts, and the early years of their relationship had been all exuberance on his part and exasperation on hers.
She'd plucked him out of bar fights and beds that were not his own, even from jail a time or two...or seven. She'd trained him up and taught him her trade. She'd been both mentor and friend, and even a mother of sorts, whenever his actions had merited being called out on the carpet. And they had; he'd been treated to the sharp side of her tongue more times than he could count, and she'd kept it honed to a razor edge, taking strips out of his hide.
Fran studied her claws, having graciously averted her eyes while he struggled into a pair of pants and sought out a shirt from the depths of his wardrobe. "You've funds enough to last you the rest of your life in perfect comfort," she remarked. "Perhaps you ought to invest in a timepiece."
"No need," he said, waving vaguely with one hand while attempting to work the buttons of his shirt with the other. "Time is arbitrary and meaningless. One only requires a watch when one has an obligation to which one must attend in a timely manner."
Fran had never been one to wear her emotions openly, but he suspected she was the slightest bit annoyed. At least she ever seemed to be when he made broad pronouncements of that nature - still, she could not argue the fact of it. Beholden to no one, their days were spent in sailing the skies, traveling in no particular hurry unless they happened to be eluding the authorities.
Time passed, and the days ran together, and there was no point in marking either them or the hours that comprised them. Until they caught wind of a new treasure to liberate, they could drift through the onward march of time with naught but a few new lines etched into their faces to account for the pleasure.
Out of habit, he asked, "Any news?"
Fran shook her head, her ash-white hair swishing down her back. "Not since last you asked. A whole week, this time. I confess I am torn: am I to be proud that you are moving on, or am I to be concerned that you are instead making a concerted effort not to ask?"
Rather than respond, Balthier snagged the gun belt wrapped haphazardly around the bed post, slinging it over his hips to belt it. Fran gave a beleaguered sigh, shouldering away from the door.
"Pick a new job," she suggested. "Anything, anywhere - you have only to choose. I weary of this wretched idleness."
Balthier seized his guns from the drawer in which he had stashed them the night before, shoving them into their holsters. "I've scarcely managed a day of idleness since my sixteenth year. Perhaps I feel deserving of a bit of a sabbatical. It's not every lifetime that one overthrows tyrannical gods."
An inelegant snort met his blithe declaration, a sure sign he'd earned Fran's censure. "We've seen five summers since then. I have them to spare, but you cannot say the same. Will you waste your short life in indolence?"
He glanced up, somewhat aggrieved to note that thus far, his had been the only face to have been marked by the passage of time. Fran would be ninety come winter, still young by her species' standards. Between the two of them, he would appear Fran's senior.
But she was sensitive to the differences in their species, had known many humes in her lifetime, and had lost most to the ravages of time and old age. A life spent in idleness was a life wasted in her opinion, and doubly so a hume life which would gutter out in a fraction of the time hers would. Fran was something of an anomaly to her kind; though she had long since perfected the art of appearing unburdened by a surfeit of emotion, her actions seldom matched the placid face she showed the world. She had never been content to seclude herself away in the viera villages; she had exiled herself from the rest of her kind, stirring up trouble the world over and meddling more or less constantly in hume affairs.
It had taken him years to understand it, but he had eventually concluded that she envied them their short, meaningful lives, whereas she searched constantly for meaning to hers and yet it eluded her. Thus she found wasted potential unbearable, unforgivable, unconscionable.
Which, of course, meant that she would continually plague him until she felt that he had taken his life in hand once more.
He supposed he ought to resent her interference. Occasionally Fran's chiding frayed his nerves, but he was ever aware that, for the most part, she did so only when the situation merited it. Which merely served to compound his guilt, knowing that she'd been chomping at the bit for weeks—months, even—waiting around for him to get off his arse and do something.
They were partners; it wasn't fair of him to keep her languishing here, wanting for a bit of adventure. But she would remain nonetheless, because she had taken him on some thirteen years before, had made the spur-of-the-moment decision to raise him up from a spoiled, feckless youth, and would not see the years she had invested in him wasted.
He owed her better than that.
Still, the thought that had plagued him for the past three years gnawed at the back of his brain, impossible to ignore. Where had she gone?
As if she had read his mind, Fran murmured, "She is bound to resurface eventually."
Incredulous, he whirled to face her. "Three years, Fran—three years!"
She shrugged. "Ashelia was dead for two."
But Penelo was not Ashelia, not a princess-in-exile, not a rebel queen hidden away for her own protection. She had no need to hide; there was no enemy that wished her dead. And yet she had dropped off the face of Ivalice three years prior, and no one seemed to have a bloody clue where she had gone. She had just...disappeared. Without a word, without a trace. And though he'd sent countless investigators to run her aground, they had all turned up precisely no leads. Which meant she was either dead...or that she did not wish to be found.
Fran had not approved of the tabs that he had kept on Penelo, had called it tantamount to spying. She had even taken subtle jabs at him, all but accusing him of nurturing a tendre for the girl, which was ridiculous.
Mostly ridiculous, at least. It might have just had the slightest smidgeon of truth. Not that he would ever admit to such a thing.
But every once in a while, Fran would cast him that searching look, as if she could see into his soul, as if she knew that he was still plagued with dreams, with memories that stuck in his brain, unshakeable. And then she would shake her head with just a shade of a wry grin, as if she thought him a lost cause.
He had played off his concern as professional interest, as Vaan and Penelo had taken to pirating within a few months of Ashe's coronation, and it was always wise to keep abreast of the doings of one's competition. Fran had not been fooled, but then she seldom was. And for the most part, she kept her peace.
"Rozarria, then," Fran suggested, her scarlet eyes locked upon his face.
Balthier scrutinized her face in a futile attempt to discern if there was some judgment in her words. "Rozarria?"
The slightest inclination of her head. "Rumors of an ancient tomb hidden filled with treasure in the jungles to the northeast abound. And the Galbana has been seen in the area."
The Galbana was Vaan's ship, and it had once housed Penelo, too. Though she'd been absent in Vaan's life these past three years—or so claimed what little intel that Balthier had managed to glean—he still might know something of her whereabouts. It was as good a chance as any.
It was the not knowing that was the worst. It was the imaginings his mind tormented him with in the absence of certainty that plagued him so. If he could simply get an answer, he would be whole once more, beset no longer by shades of the past.
"And you wish to go to Rozarria in search of this treasure?" he asked.
She gave a long-suffering sigh. "Balthier, I wish to go," she said. No specific destination, objective unimportant.
And he wondered briefly if he hadn't been misattributing his own hesitance to her, if she hadn't been so much irritated with his lack of direction but with his indecision. She only wanted to go—she didn't care where they went, what their purpose. She would accompany him no matter how ill-considered she thought his aim. She didn't care what he did, so long as he did something.
Still, he said, "If Vaan is on the hunt for that tomb, it is likely that our paths shall cross."
"We are two to his one," she replied. "Delaying him ought not present a problem." A brief pause. "Nor should convincing him to part with what information he might possess."
His confirmation. He smothered a grin. "Then chart us a course, and I shall go provisioning."
Given that they had been stagnating in Archades for the better part of a month, their stores had been desperately depleted. Not that it had been of any particular concern of Balthier's; who would need bother themselves with the stock of potions and ethers within the city? And with a plethora of restaurants and taverns to choose from, replenishing the kitchen stock was hardly at the top of his list.
Thus it was the work of an entire afternoon to manage all the things he hadn't bothered with in some time. By the time they were in the air, dusk was falling over the horizon, streaking the sky in shadowed purple. They'd be flying through the night, most likely, which suited Balthier just fine, as they very first modification he'd made to the Strahl - after Larsa had officially gifted it to him as recompense for his efforts in service to the crown - had been a top of the line autopilot module. Not that he didn't enjoy flying her himself, but it did come in handy on particularly long voyages. High in the atmosphere, thousands of feet above even the tallest treetops, there were no obstacles to dodge, nothing to concentrate on except the endless expanse of sky.
Fran had retired to her room shortly after ten, but Balthier had lingered on the deck, seated in his captain's chair, his boots propped upon the navigation console and his hands folded behind his head. Before him stretched the night sky in its infinite, inky blackness, peppered with thousands of stars, glinting coldly in the darkness of space.
Somehow their distant glimmer was nostalgic, like threads of a memory drifting just out of reach, producing a melancholy ache in his chest, a nameless longing for a time that had come and gone and had left only ghosts and shadows in its wake.
It was long minutes before he traced the sensation to its origin, dissecting the feeling down to its components, analyzing the cross-sections of the glowing stars and comparing them against the memories tucked away in his head.
And still the stars glittered brightly, accusingly, as if to chastise him for misplacing the memory, for misplacing everything, until at last, in the face of that frigid disapproval, he seized upon it.
They reminded him of snowflakes.