There the Bones of Us May Lie
Grant us, in our direst need, the smallest gifts: the nail of the horseshoe, the pin of the axle, the feather at the pivot point, the pebble at the mountain's peak, the kiss in despair, the one right word. In darkness, understanding.
- Paladin of Souls (Lois McMaster Bujold)
The hollow starlight sinks into ashen softness before her as she boards the Strahl; the hungry roar of the Cataract is hushed, made muted and metallic. It is like sinking into water, reversed. The quiet is the same, the sense of distance, but as she ascends there is no persistent buoyancy, no insistent upward press. Weight seems to sink down on her instead, settling deeper about her shoulders like a mantle.
It's familiar.
The silence of the ship eats her sigh, giving back nothing. And that, too is familiar — comforting, even, to have no wraiths answering those unmeant nighttime summons. The Occuria's illusion of Rasler is shattered, and Vaan isn't here to haunt her either, sleeping below with the others; Ashe is alone if not exactly unfettered. It is beyond her, just now, to judge whether that is better, and that is, in any case, irrelevant. There is little point in dwelling on it, now.
Her steps ring in soft staccato company as she approaches the cabin. The starlight stripes it silver in gentle asymmetrical swathes. She supposes it's lovely. The aesthetic holds little interest for Ashe. Balthier insists she's beautiful, but Ashe is more inclined to watch the way Fran smiles at the ship. If Fran thinks her beautiful, Ashe will take her silent word on it. And it may be that the beauty Fran sees is closer to the one Ashe seeks, not found in the graceful arch of wing or the staid symmetry of circuitry.
Ashe's fingers stroke the yoke. It is such a small surface of control, to tip such power to and fro.
"Surely my lady is not thinking to run off with my mistress again?"
Ashe's head whips around at Balthier's smooth timbre. He leans against the bulkhead, hip cocked and arms crossed, brow raised in a sardonic line. Ashe almost snaps at him, mouth tightening into a scowl, but some brittle shadow of expression stays her tongue: the tense angle of Balthier's jaw, the thin unhappy lines that bracket his lips. At his waist, the pouch that holds his esper stones is untied, and she imagines his deft fingers untying it as he sits by the fire, imagines the heft of Famfrit's glyph in his hand, heavy and warm like Ultima sometimes sits in hers: the silent communion of it, the soft pulse of magick like a beating heart against his hand, a phantom heat entirely unlike the fire that would stroke Balthier's face this cold night. Imagines what the echo of Doctor Cid's touch must feel like, imprinted on the glyph like wet breath. Ultima, the Virgin, is untouched, and Raithwall's echo on Belias is both too distant and too familiar, but Fran spoke to her once of the touch of others, strangers, on Exodus, esper memory vital and vivid and bleeding between senses. She does not wish to think on what Doctor Cid would feel like in Famfrit's glyph. But she can imagine the complex planes of Balthier's face, the pensive bite of lip; Balthier's hand closing around the stone at some small noise she must have made as she left the circle of sleepers, his alert eyes following her ascent into the ship. The stone dropping into the pouch, the ties forgotten as he follows her. The tension about his face remains, as he stands here before her, but the alertness does too, that piercing gaze that sees too deep.
She softens her tone, then, if not her words.
"You would do well to keep a civil tongue. You presume too much."
"Do I? Which is the lady and which the mistress, then?"
"Whichever one is most likely to vex me, I would wager. What are you doing here, Balthier?"
"Here on my ship, you mean?" He smiles.
She huffs in exasperation. His eyes follow her as she moves towards the yoke again. She feels his gaze on her fingers, possessive as she touches the controls.
"Do you know how?" he asks quietly. "The ballads never say, when the stubborn princess steals the airship, how she learned to fly."
Her lips quirk in spite of her. She should be exasperated, and she is, but the smile comes unbidden, as so many things about Balthier do. She tucks the smile into something sharper before looking at him. "And if I didn't?"
His brow tilts in faint surprise, or disbelief, perhaps. That he thinks it absurd lets her forgive him, a little, for playing the game with his response. "Why, I would teach you, of course. What could be more heroic than giving a lady the keys to her prison? The walls are damp and bleak and cold, my lady fair and warm, and fit to join the sun her sister in the sky." The cadences roll off his tongue, practiced and — Ashe draws a breath inward — both self-mocking and dear. He is, still, a son of noble houses, and for a moment she thinks of him, young, escaped from his brothers and tucked into some sunny sheltered room with an old book, overdressed and tugging, impatient, at a collar too tight and ornate, lip caught between his teeth as his eyes fly over the crumbling pages. Or perhaps she thinks of a little girl, under a less temperate sun, and suddenly she is impatient, angry at this vulnerability, at wondering what tales he imagines for her. Of her. About her.
"And would you sit me before you on your bird 'neath sky the hue of magicite, slip your fingers 'round my delicate wrists, whisper instructions in my maiden ear? I read the romances, ser."
Balthier's brow twists further up at the honorific before his expression tips into a cooler mask. "My lady would have no need of instruction, being both well-read and well-ridden."
He is not being clumsy, she is sure — he must be practiced enough at courtly venom for that. She should be insulted, and it is always like this with him, her heart too quiet when it shouldn't be, anger flaring at such smaller things. Her eyes search him. "Look elsewhere for maidens, hero," she tells him, guarded.
"Why would I look for maidens? They come to me, or not at all." He is silent a moment before he goes on, quiet. "I am no romance hero."
"No, Balthier?" She does not say his former name. It would be too much like throwing it in his face, and she is not angry enough for that. But it hangs behind her tone, heavy as the day that hangs behind them both, and she thinks again of how he must have held Famfrit as he watched her leave the fire.
His eyes meet hers in the darkness. "No." He says it again, softer. "No. I'm not."
"What are you doing here, Balthier?" she repeats her first question, and is no longer sure she means the same thing by it.
"What are you?" His head tips down; his eyes are shadowed beneath his brow as he regards her.
She might have looked away, once. But that Ashe is gone, somewhere, dead or unborn and in any case irrelevant. She holds his gaze.
"I don't owe you any answers."
"Tch." His gaze slides away; his hands give a frustrated twitch, and then he looks at her again. "You don't," he agrees bluntly, "but that's not why I ask." His hands start towards her again, stop, the motions jerky, and the unpolished action is naked, graceless. It is warm and nauseating. It sticks in her throat, sharp. But it is not ground she will yield.
"I know," she says.
"You will never make anything easy, will you?" It is so quiet, the words slipping into the close spaces of the cabin.
"No," she agrees. It should be teasing, this. It should be warm, not this rasp of hard edges. The words are familiar, a thousand storybooks and a thousand spirited princesses swept off their feet by dashing heroes spouting playful banter, and the stories never show what happens after, or before, or the millions of moments between breaths. No one has scars that mean nothing, or wounds that leave no trace. No one is left in the dark, the only word between them no. There are no right words to speak, and so she does not try.
She says his name, instead. "Balthier." Her hands come up to his, still them, press them against the bulkhead, flatten them with a press of palms against his knuckles. He regards her, breath too even, strain hovering just beneath. She takes her hands away from his, brings them to his face; her thumb slides down the arch of cheekbone, across his mouth, and his lips part, inhale rushing cool against her fingers, then the hot exhalation like the warmth of her blood. Her hand firms on his chin, and she draws him down.
"Ashe," he says against her mouth, almost helpless.
She meets his eyes. "I don't owe you answers," she repeats, slowly, "but it is— important that you understand." Her hands are still on his face; his hands are against the ship, no longer flat, fingers curled and tense. He nods, and something of that brittle tension seeps back into him. She feels it under her fingers like a hot poison.
"We chose, this day. We chose choice."
"The skies are open wide, right above us," he agrees. "And you are in here."
She sighs, and feels it spill back upon her, reflected off his breast. She takes a step away, and one of her hands creeps up to her own chest, curls there. "More choices do not always make it easier." She looks back up at him, and his eyes tell him that her meaning is not lost. But then, they have never had many illusions there, the two of them. "There is... an absence of pressure." She brushes her hand against the pouch with the esper stones, still undone at his hip.
His eyes flicker down, startled, and when they meet hers again, they are harder. "Just because my father has seen fit to deprive me of a convenient target to rebel against does not mean— It changes nothing." And perhaps that was not something he wished her to guess at, his quiet moments with his dead father's esper. She is not sorry for it, and softens her voice relentlessly.
"A ship is not freedom, Balthier. Not for me. It is power, and power is responsibility."
"And you came in here, out from under the sky. One bird inside another. Is it your cage you miss, then?" His tone should be mocking— that it is not, that it is soft, that it is gentle: this infuriates her.
"Don't you dare pity me my cage, Balthier." She bites out the words, and there is not enough heat in her body to contain this. "I may have been born to it — and that only by the buried bones of all my brothers — but I have chosen it every minute you have spent in my company. Pity me in this, and we are through."
He reels as though she has slapped him— and really, she should have. The rage boils in her, scrabbles through her skin.
Then he gathers himself and his eyes snap, a cutting gold. "Don't pity me my parentage either, then. It's my father we killed today, not yours."
Her teeth clench, and she surges forward, open palm flying. His hand snaps out, catches her wrist, and her breath hisses through her teeth, hot. He waits her out before he continues. "Soften yourself on my account, princess, and we are finished, too."
The breath of his words is soft on her face, softer by far than the truth of them; she feels the break of heat across her skin, the movement of air in the small space left between them. She feels the rush of it in her own lungs, breast rising too fast. She feels the iron strength of him, matched against the hard-earned muscle of her own arm. He looks her in the eyes.
She had not meant pity by it, by the gentling of her tone tonight, but he has his pride, and it may be the first time she sees it to be as fierce as hers, and as implacable.
"We wrong each other so much, Balthier." The words slip into the night, such gentle wings of breath.
His grips softens around her wrist. "We right each other, too." His lips twist in something like a smile. It's uneven, entirely too honest.
"You let wordplay get the better of you. When have I ever righted you?" It's not what we do, she thinks. We do not help each other up. I want no one to help me up. I want the space to place my hands upon the floor and push.
"You correct me often enough."
"Words," she says. "Games. Do not play me."
His thumb swipes across the pulse in her wrist, pad rough against the thin skin over her veins, and she draws in a breath, slow. He moves his finger again, gentler, slower. His eyes burn.
She has never been afraid of fire.
"I have done what is necessary for a long time. There is nothing necessary about what I want."
"Choice does not make things easier." He echoes her, unrelenting, and she is glad of it.
"How do you think it will end, Balthier?" Her other hand is upon him now, curved into the shape of his collarbone. His other hand rises to cover it. "How do the stories end?" If half the things they say to each other mock the courtly games of men and women, so be it. Their lives are a mockery of such regardless.
"And there the bones of us may lie, the dust of us upon each other," he quotes, a murmur against her skin, and she does not shake at the permanence of this, at the question in his eyes.
"Not our bones." Hers to a Dalmascan crypt somewhere, and his — ash on the wind, or perhaps carried with Fran when her viera life outlasts his, and Ashe would not begrudge her this. "No, not us, I think. Not ever."
"But we are not bones yet."
"No, we are not." She is forever agreeing with him in the negative. She is tired of it, and she answers his next question before he asks it, instead.
"Yes."
She kisses him, in the dark.
Notes: Written for DOINK! Final Fantasy Exchange 2013. Because KJ is amazing.
As always, feedback and crit of all kinds welcome =)
Prompt:
Ashe, Balthier, and a stolen moment on the Strahl. Can be during or after the events of the game. I love the two of them together, but I don't love hand-waving all the issues that stand between them having a relationship. I want to see them finding time for each other *despite* those all things.