In The Service Of The Queen

A Final Fantasy 12 fan fiction by xahra99

'I belong- in the service of the queen

I belong -anywhere but in between.'

Counting Crows-The Rain King.

A short Basch/Ashe PWP, simply because I thought it was a long time since I wrote any honest shagging. Classed as erotica because it took me five pages to get to the shagging, but then that's my style of writing for you. Set aboard Balthier's airship some time after the escape from the Shiva. Rated NC-17 for sex, swearing, and gratuitous discussion of pianos. With thanks to logistikanyx for beta-ing.

Ashe was staring out of the window when he found her.

She stood with her palms to the cool blue glass and looked down on the desert with a blank expression on her face. If the window had been any other but the Strahl's he might have wondered if she was about to jump, but the airship's windows did not open. At first Basch thought that she was crying. As he approached he realized that it was a trick of the light, a reflection of the rain on the glass.

"Ashe." he said gently.

Silence.

He hesitated, and walked closer, and his own reflection appeared in the glass beside Ashe like a rain swept blue ghost. Grey clouds scudded past, parting every so often to reveal a tiny cluster of lights far below.

"Ashe?"

Princes Ashelia B'Nargen of Dalmasca said nothing. Her body was rigid, her narrow jaw was set and her eyes glared out into the rain with the same steely glint as her foolish scraps of armor.

"Are you all right?" he asked her, cursing himself for asking such a stupid question.

"I'm fine." Her voice was small. "Damn Vossler."

Basch nodded. The truth was that he had realized a few seconds after the Shiva exploded into a mist of shattered glass that he was pretty incapable of anger over Vossler's betrayal. Backstabbing was, he thought, like a virus. The more it occurred, the more you were accustomed to the process. After Noah, it would not have particularly surprised Basch if anyone among their motley crew turned their coat.

Anybody, that is, apart from Ashe.

"We'll light a candle for him later."

"We can't," she said, "we're on an airship. No naked flames, remember." She curled both her hands into fists and stared at the sky. The Strahl's engines thudded steadily, propelling them inexorably towards their destination.

Basch looked at the princess helplessly. Lighting a candle wouldn't make Vossler any less dead-he was gone already, his body burned to glowing embers- but it was all he could suggest to make Ashe feel better. "We could go and find Vaan and the others." he said.

"No." Ashe said. "I need to stay here. They can't see me. Not like this." She looked up at him for the first time -Basch was a tall man and even in her high-heeled, iron-shod boots, Ashe stood a good foot shorter than him- and he realized that she really was crying.

He put his arms around her.

After the first few seconds he realized that he had forgotten the proper procedure for embracing a queen. He sighed, paused and continued. He didn't seem to be doing too badly. Ashe's body grew rigid for a fleeting second and he wondered if she would slap him (Dalmascan protocol listed eight different ways for a member of the royal house to strike a servant who had displeased them) but then she relaxed.

"How dare he die..." she whispered into his doublet.

"He did what he thought was best." Basch said diplomatically.

"It wasn't, though. Was it?"

Not for him, it seems. Basch thought, but what he said was "I don't know."

"Tell me I'm doing the right thing." she demanded.

"Yes.' Basch said. Tentatively, he stroked her hair. It was soft beneath his fingers and a silvery brown in color; saved from being mousy simply because it was royal. The strands caught in his calloused fingers. Ashe reached up and looped one arm around his neck, locking her head under his chin and bringing pieces of her armor in intimate contact with pieces of his flesh. He moved slightly to a more comfortable position and found he had a rather more pressing problem. Ashe caught her breath, and he hoped desperately that she hadn't noticed. Surely codpieces must be good for something? he thought, and resolved not to move again.

Unfortunately, Ashe seemed to have had the same idea. She said nothing, but her arm tightened around his neck. Her hair smelt of Shiva's brig. Despite himself, Basch found the scent wildly erotic. There were certain things he had missed in the Nalbina dungeon, after all, and things he had missed more than others.

"I thought that you couldn't forgive me." he said gently into her hair.

"I changed my mind."

"I see." Basch said, although he didn't, not really. Noah had always said he was dense with women.

He still wasn't sure if she still blamed him for the death of her father or even that of her husband –after all, he was in charge of the party at the time-but the way that she was still locked around his body like a hungry Rafflesia seemed to indicate that there were no hard feelings.

Ashe's hand slid from the nape of his neck up into his hair. Her other arm was still locked around his waist, and he could feel the cold steel of her gauntlet against his naked chest.

He told himself later that he meant to kiss her gently on the forehead. But Ashe reached up and turned her head, and he ended up kissing her lips.

There was, in fact, a proper procedure for kissing a queen of Dalmasca. It involved kneeling, and the merest touch of lips to the back of a gloved hand. It had four numbered steps.

Basch followed none of them.

He noted dimly that Ashe didn't seem too well acquainted with the rules for a member of the former royal family. She swayed and reached out with one open hand for the window glass to steady herself, and he stepped closer and looped an arm around her waist. She gasped, and he remembered in a rush that she was young, and widowed, and no doubt suffering from some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder.

He let go of her so quickly Ashe staggered. Her mouth gaped slightly as he dropped to one knee.

"My lady. Forgive me."

Ashe put her hands on her hips. Her face was pale, her lips set tight. "Oh, get up."

Basch rose, feeling faintly foolish. Ashe took a step forwards, and another, until she was close enough to reach out and kiss again, should Basch so wish. He hastily clasped his hands behind his back. "My lady?"

"I know exactly what I am doing." Ashe said. Her chin was set at a haughty angle. "I am Princess Ashelia B'Nargen of Dalmasca, after all. And I know my own mind. "

Basch fought to keep a straight face, and lost. He recognized pomposity when he saw it. As the royal couple's bodyguard, he had been forced to endure a great many of the Marquis Halim Ondore's banquets. He smiled.

The princess folded her arms. And then the princess's lips quivered, and she laughed.

It was the first genuine laugh he had heard from her since before Dalmasca's fall, and it echoed from the Strahl's bulkheads like the first squall of rain over the plains. "Belias! I can't believe I just said that."

"I can." Basch said lightly.

Ashe's smile disappeared as fast as it had come, and Basch wondered, not for the first time, if he had said the wrong thing. He attempted to distract her. "Do you want to head for the flight deck? I hear Balthier and Vaan have a card game going."

Once again, it seemed like he'd said the wrong thing. Ashe shook her head with a violence that startled him. It did not, however, startle him as much as her next sentence.

"Be with me,' she said, "I want to forget. Why not?"

Basch stared at her. A thousand replies raced through his head. She was nineteen. He was thirty six. She was a queen. He was not. She was the widow of one of his best friends. They were in the middle of a war. The flight deck was nearby, and the walls on the Strahl were really quite thin. He wondered if he had misheard.

When Ashe walked towards him and kissed him again, he knew that he had not. She was the one who initiated the kiss, but he was the one who laced an arm around her slim waist, the one who traced the line of her jaw with the tips of his fingers. Ashe reached up to trace the line of his scar, and he shivered.

Like all good kisses, it felt like it lasted for much longer than it actually did.

They both pulled back. Ashe was breathing hard, her lips flushed. Basch hoped to God that the sky pirate didn't come walking down the corridor.

"As my lady commands." he said thickly.

She pushed him away. "Not like that. As if I'm Amalia. As if I'm not your queen."

Basch sighed. "That's…going to be-" hard. So hard. He winced.

"Be what?"

"-difficult." he finished.

"But will you try?" she asked.

He nodded quickly, ignoring his conscience screaming that he was there to defend, not conquer. "Yes, my lady, -my lady Ashe-"

"Ashe is fine, still.' she said, her eyes already distant. "We'll have to think of somewhere to go."

That turned out to be the easy part.

The Strahl had dozens of tiny cabins, many with secret compartments or passages that led to other rooms. They were crammed with smuggled goods and decorated like the ship in an ostentatious Archadian style that Balthier had either ignored or attempted to subvert in an entirely random fashion. Basch chose one of the nearest. It had lime-green wallpaper, an embossed ceiling stubbed with gilded cherubs and a mauve carpet that sucked at his boots, but he was pretty sure that it had no secret passages. A fairly normal bed took up most of the floor space. A gilded soda fountain stood in one corner. The opposite corner held a piano carved entirely out of malachite.

Ashe inhaled sharply as they walked in. "Unusual." she said, and looked around the cabin as if she was accustomed to better things. "I thought Balthier had taste."

"You did?"

"That was almost a joke, was it not?"

"I try." Basch said. He wasn't sure what to say next. The practicality of finding a room and planning the encounter seemed to have spoiled the mood. He raised his hand to rub his scarred ear and found Ashe studying him with relentless concentration. Her hands rested lightly on her hips, and her head was tilted to the left. He noticed the way she turned her toes in, balancing lightly on the balls of her feet, and the way her flat stomach rose and fell underneath her black silk bustier. He found her attractive. He had always found her attractive.

In the Dalmascan royal palace, Ashe would have been dressed by two maidservants, but after two years of resistance fighting Basch found that she was as skilled at removing armor as any soldier. Her hands were soft, with a thin layer of calluses laid on top of seventeen years of pampering that hadn't quite, despite Ashe's best efforts, disappeared. He could circle her wrists with thumb and forefinger.

She had removed his armored gloves and was working on his doublet by the time he reached down to help her. She pushed his hands impatiently away, her tongue poking between her teeth in concentration. "Let me do this."

Basch wondered how far she would go and got his answer when he was naked from the waist up and she was tugging at his belt. "I don't think that this is entirely fair."

Ashe looked startled, as if the notion of 'fair' had never crossed her mind. Basch got the feeling for the first time that she hadn't quite thought this through. "All right then." she said. "You can undress me."

Basch took a little more time than Ashe had, sliding his hand under the waistband of her skirt and inside her knickers as he unbuckled her belt. The skirt was short enough that he wondered why she bothered. Thankfully, Ashe had already removed her shoes and armored kneepads. That just left her shirt, her black bustier, her knickers and half a dozen pieces of assorted armor. Basch removed each item in turn.

Ashe held her arms out to her sides as he did so. Her breathing quickened as his fingers skated over her skin. As he unlaced her shirt he took each of her nipples into his mouth and sucked them slowly. She gasped, captured his right hand between both of hers and nipped the pad of his index finger lightly.

"Why look at me like that?"

"You're beautiful." Basch said simply.

Ashe looked down at her body. She let go of his finger, ran both her hands down her hips and slid her knickers down her legs. Naked, she stepped out of them and looked back up at Basch. "Well, you are too, you know. "she said straightforwardly. "Come to bed."

Basch wished that Ashe hadn't left his trousers on. They were getting in the way. He stripped himself with as much dignity and grace as he could muster and joined her.

There wasn't a proper procedure for a commoner (even a minor member of exiled nobility) to make love to a queen. Basch imagined that the authors of the Dalmascan royal conduct guides had never imagined such a thing should be necessary. He wondered if he should compare her to a summer's day, but decided against it. In the far-off days when Ashe had been besieged on a weekly basis by suitors with gem-studded rings and hopeful expressions, he had heard a rumor that one poet who had compared her to a graceful doe had been strung up in the palace garden for a week to learn some practical zoology.

Basch didn't think it was true (summary acts of punishment were unlike Ashe), but silence seemed safest. He thought that that he was doing okay right up the point when she ran her nails over the slick skin of his scar. The desire had been spreading like slow honey through his blood ever since Ashe invited him to undress her, but the simple gesture was like a flash fire. He was dimly aware of Ashe moaning and rocking against him, her head thrown back to expose her throat and the feathery ends of her hair spread out on the pale green pillow.

"It's been a long time, my lady."

"That's... all right." Ashe sounded breathless, and as Basch spent himself with a gasp he thought that it was all right, she didn't know that she was lying.

He came back to himself a moment later with Ashe clutching at his shoulders and making frantic little mewling noises against his hair. Basch held her shoulders and slid his hands and himself right down her body as Ashe shuddered. He wondered if she was imagining a dead man's mouth between her legs until she arched her hips and twisted under him, pulled a pillow over her face and cried out Rasler's name.

"I'm sorry." she said a little awkwardly afterwards. Her usually pale cheeks were flushed and she smelt of sweat with an undertone of expensive perfume.

"Don't be."

"I didn't sleep with Vossler, you know." she said. "If that's what you were thinking."

She sounded embarrassed and self-conscious and far less confident that she normally did.

"I didn't."

"It's been a long time for me as well. I just wanted…well, I don't know. And it was good. I just don't want you to think badly of me. Like I always sleep with my bodyguards."

"I don't usually sleep with-"Basch paused, wondering who he usually did sleep with. A knight's life offered many opportunities, but not much time.

"Princesses?" Ashe flung one leg over his hips under the sheets.

"People," Basch corrected her. "that I am sworn to protect."

"You wouldn't be much of a knight if you did." Ashe's bare toes tickled up and down his calves.

"I was disgraced."

"Not for this."

"Mmm." Basch said cautiously. His personal tastes did not run to women seventeen years younger than himself, or queens, or threesomes, even if one of the participants was a ghost. To mention even one of those would indicate ingratitude, and Basch was not ungrateful. He kept silent.

Ashe's slender fingers traced constellations on his chest and he rolled over to kiss her. She stretched out across the bed, pointing her toes like some archaic ballerina, relaxed and pillowed her head on her arm. Her breathing grew heavier.

"I will have vengeance, you know. For my father, for Rasler-even for Reks." she said sleepily. "We will take back Dalmasca, and everything will be just as it was."

Basch waited for her to say more, but as the seconds drifted by he realized that she had fallen asleep.

He would have followed her, but the bed was far too comfortable for someone who had recently spent nearly two years of his life curled up on a stone floor. After half an hour's tossing and turning, he got up, retrieved his clothes from the floor by touch, dressed and quickly slipped out of the door. He meant to fetch a glass of tea from the ship's kitchen, or lean on the railing to watch the desert scudding past as Ashe had done a short time before, but as he closed the door quietly and turned, he saw that somebody else had had the same idea. Balthier lounged with his elbows on the guard rail. He held a steaming cup in one hand and a bhujerba-weed cigarillo in the other despite his own ban on naked flames.

"Ah, Basch." he said. "The green room. How did you find it?"

"Nice piano." Basch said.

"Mmm. Worth quite a lot." Balthier said. He paused and took a deep drag on his cigarette, exhaling fumes into the purified and recycled air. "Hideous, but sometimes I acquire items in trade that are worth a good sum to the right buyer. Problem is, sometimes you have to wait a while until you find out who that is."

"Have you tried Rozarria?"

Balthier smiled. "I might as well." He slipped a pack of cigarillos from one of the many pockets of his breeches and held one out to Basch. 'Cigarette?"

"I don't smoke." Basch said.

Balthier arched one eyebrow. "You look like you need one."

Basch looked down at himself. Thankfully, he had managed not to dress himself in any pieces of Ashe's discarded armor, or even worse, her clothes. "What do you mean by that?" he asked.

"Simply that it looks as if you found a way to make the trip less tedious." Balthier said laconically.

Basch's had strayed to his belt. Although he had managed to collect both belt and trousers, he had forgotten his sword. Balthier saw the movement, arched his other eyebrow and held up one hand.

"Oh, I'm not bothered." the sky pirate said. "I just wish I'd thought of it first."

Basch grunted.

Balthier smiled, and the Strahl flew on, heading for Bur-Omisace.