A/N Hey all, another little thing for you all. Not beta'd, due to the fact that I haven't got a beta, but please tell me if you think something's off.
Everybody knows that the images that you see in the mist are simply yourself, from a different angle. After all, what or indeed who, else could look so much like you, be wearing your garb and move only when you do?
Everybody knows this, but still many prefer to keep their eyes downcast, on the tangibility of the ground when they walk their path through the Feywood or prowl through the cloying halls of contaminate Nabudis.
Balthier knows why, or he thinks he does. A mark, magnificent in potential, startles and breaks through the carefully machinated formation that Bash, ever the mechanical man, has formulated.
Balthier sprints, full of intent to get it back, that no other may claim what is theirs ( is his, he has to correct himself in his head, annoyed).
The mark, being both larger than he and faster in a wooded place, soon pulls ahead. He follows the sound of scale on bark until even those noses fade to the basic forest static, or as close as is possible in this particular wood.
Balthier is left behind by the creature and, more to his surprise and - should he choose to admit it – growing consternation.
He thought that Fran, in the very least, would have been able to remain at his side. Then again she may have gone to cut the mark off, as it would less likely elude her.
No matter, he thinks. No matter, even as he jumps, startled, by a glimpse of white sleeves in the almost corporeal ether. Balthier mutters Akademy wisdom to himself, knows it less than wisdom now, but for comfort still he says mind over matter, mind over matter.
Balthier will admit that he is a man not meant to be alone.
He will say, freely to any, that a leading man is always in need of an audience. He will admit to cold stone on his forehead, pavement under his knees at the mouth of any ally in Ivalice – he will admit to them when his breath is dank with mhadu that he doesn't exist without one.
If he is too long alone then every ghost crawls towards him, clinging to his shiny buttons and sulk cuffs with gossamer fingers, begging him to take them to the sky.
Even an hour brings them crawling blindly, and Balthier curses himself for forgetting that they come with a whiplash vengeance, strength in the corner of their mouths and the flex of their fingers in his skin; he curses for forgetting that they are almost real in the Feywood.
The brightest and boldest ghosts are almost solid in the Mist, and these are the ones that Balthier first thinks are merely reflections of himself bounced back at him. But they dispel this notion when one of those seeming reflections turns itself to an angle whereby Balthier can see its face.
The hair is much the same as his, both in style and colour, however the eyes are much too large. Wherein life they were akin to A green canopy refracted and diluted - a jungle viewed through a drop of water, now in death they seem to be cesspits of rotting vegetation. Balthier knows nothing of these strange, Stygian, depths - but Ffamran, that sickly child who never quite released his grip on Balthier, does.
The last time he met those eyes he was but twelve years old; a bundle of barely (completely...) warranted hurt; he was to say goodbye to his second favourite brother - the first born Bunansa of this generation. Cap was to help Cid (never father, not even at this point) build a pretty weapon which was to launch still heated bronze bullets at whomsoever displeased the finger on the trigger. More like a crossbow than a gun, but gunpowder still burnt hot throughout the device.
Since Cap helped sketch the design, his delicate fingers smeared with charcoal as he mapped out each angle and curve of the thing, Cid names it after him. The Capella: Cap's full name which only their mother ever chose to use. Whether through arrogance or chance the thing is much the same hue of Bronze as Cap's hair and Ffamran, malicious at twelve, just knows the malachite handle was a touch of vanity from his brother.
It is the last time he meets Cap's eyes, as Cap leaves for another day in the workroom to help perfect the range of his pretty gun. It is the last time as the gunpowder rages too hot for the bronze frame to contain, and it explodes in a nebula of white hot metal and fractured stone shards. Cap's eyes are blistered sightless in their sockets and, so Ffamran hears from two careless maids hushed gossip a few days later, he dies for hours, screaming out of his scorched throat. Cid leaves him die in the hands of the healers, and offers no words of explanation or consolement to his other sons.
Later, Ffamran crawls into the closed off workspace and gathers close the mostly melted frame of steel and bronze, cuts his soft child's fingers on scraping up any shard of the green stone that he can see, most still tinged with his brothers blood, a small legacy that only Ffamran will ever acknowledge in that household. He meticulously puts all he could find into a small chest and tucks them away in his nest of pillows.
When Ffamran is fourteen a maid finds it, and Cid steals it away from him, not even affording him the chest with a small, old bloodstain in the corner. Ffamran knows by now - knew at twelve, at ten, longer than he cared to remember, he knows not to expect any raised voices, any concern for his state of mind or even that the remnants of gunpowder could have killed him in his sleep.
Later that month the military signs a contract for a thousand or so Capellas and Ffamran averts his eyes any time a military man might pass by him in the streets of Archades, so that he may never see his brothers colours again.
Within half a month the guns are outdated and Ffamran veers between victorious vindication and a mourning desolation at the sight of his brother's guns abandoned to the corrupt and the base; the footsoldiers and thieves in old Archades. These, his brother's legacy, Ffamran the only living preservatory to the story. Ffamran rails against Cid, blaspheming Cap's memory when he screams it at him to prove Cid's failures; this is one more prelude to leaving.
All this he thinks in twenty, thirty seconds, ineloquently as he stares at the features of his brother whose features mould themselves again into his own. He fights the desire to run after his brother, grasp his sleeve; he has been neither a brother nor a follower for years. This ghost of the Feywood stalks away as he moves himself forward; sweat stinging at the small of his back, sticking his shirt to him where even his rapid chase of the mark he once pursued had left it dry.