Black Guard Rising
Disclaimer all known and recognisable characters and locales property of Square Enix; I just enjoy playing with them, abusing them, and otherwise misusing these masterful characters.
Prologue: 709 O.V: The Royal Palace Rabanastre
Ashe knew there was something very definitely wrong as soon as she entered her private chambers. A Queen was almost never alone except when she was safely shut away in her bed chamber and while Ashe usually relished the brief eight hours during the night she had to herself, she now found her hand curling around the small dagger she kept on a leather thong at her hip as she stared down at the three, almost flower like spatters of crimson blood staining the smooth grey veined marble of her chamber floor.
The doors to her balcony had been forced open from the outside and there were smears of blood on the gauzy white curtains. Ashe unsheathed the dagger, moving silently to her chest at the foot of her bed where she kept the sword of kings in a custom made magickally imbued scabbard. There was someone in her bathroom. She could hear the harsh rasp of pained breathing.
The door to the en-suite toilet and bathroom was half ajar but she could not see who was inside. There was a flicker of shadow and light, someone moving jerkily and the quick, sharp sound of a in-drawn breath. Ashe hesitated. Three years of official rule and two years of guerrilla warfare with the resistance had given Ashe a rather contradictory set of instincts when faced with situations like these. One the one hand she had a small army of guardsmen paid to protect her royal person, on the other, she still preferred to fight her own battles.
Should she make her presence known to her intruder, or should she leave swiftly and alert the guard?
'You may as well come in, Highness,' the intruder in the bathroom called out to her and Ashe felt her jaw drop as she recognised the voice despite the strain that drew it taut and stole the music from its cadence, 'I can hear you dithering about out there.'
Balthier?
Ashe was in motion before she could think better of it. In the tiny increments of time marking the few feet between her bed and the bathroom door, a dozen thoughts ran through Ashe's mind. What was the pirate doing here? She had not had any contact with him since the Lemures troubles. In her day to day life in fact she doubted she ever spared a thought for him. She had more contact with Vaan and Penelo in fact, especially since the pair had given up pirating for more respectable lives in Rabanastre.
Ashe pushed open the door to the bathroom, dagger drawn before her. Life's hard lessons had taught her that an ally could easily become an enemy given time and opportunity enough and whatever bonds of camaraderie or anything else that had once stood between she and the pirate had long since been severed.
'Balthier what is the meaning of….' She stopped mid-chastisement. Her eyes widened and most of the thoughts in her head promptly took flight and departed. The pirate sat on the ornate tiled rim of her bathtub shirtless. Of course Ashe did not really comprehend his state of semi-undress because her eyes were mostly taken up with the mounds of foul smelling soiled bandages lying like discarded serpent skins all over the mosaic tiled floor.
'Good gods,' she breathed as the pirate rather clumsily juggled a bottle of some astringent smelling anti-septic lotion, reams of unspooling fresh bandages in one hand. His face was down turned and set in a grimace as he gripped in his teeth a vicious looking needle threaded with surgical grade couerl gut thread.
'I assure you highness,' Balthier gritted out around his mouthful, roughly upending the bottle of lotion onto the bandages and managing to splash most of the noxious stuff all over her polish tiles in the process, 'That the gods had nothing to do with this.'
Ashe had finally realised by this point what it was Balthier was trying to do. One whole side of his body, including his right arm, had become one advancing purple-black bruise, the scent of raw and shredded meat assailing her nostrils and filling the enclosed space of her bathroom was not one Ashe had ever thought to experience outside of a battlefield.
Balthier awkwardly slammed the wadded fistful of lotion soaked bandages against his side and Ashe was at his side in a instant as the pirate couldn't hold back a surprisingly savage howl of pain. The threaded bone needle fell from his lips (which was preferable to the man swallowing it) as Balthier doubled up in obvious pain.
'Balthier what has happened – let me see your wound.' Without waiting for him to comply she managed to push him upright and slap away the left arm he had curled around himself protectively. The pirate was sucking in rasping lung-full's of air, akin to a landed fish, head thrown back and eyes wild as he fought for composure.
Ashe stared at the horrible smelling blackened, puckered and pus rimmed bullet hole throbbing angrily on Balthier's lower right side. Instantly she dropped to her knees to further investigate the horrid, putrid wound.
'Why have you not had this healed?' she demanded of him but Balthier was not really up for conversation. Most likely completely unconsciously he had dropped one bloody hand onto her shoulder as she knelt before him and was gripping on for dear life. She heard the jangle of his ear-rings as he fiercely, mutely, shook his head. Whether in response to her words or simply in an attempt to deny the pain she did not know.
Ashe snatched the lotion soaked rags from Balthier's badly scrapped right hand and looked up into his sweat drenched face, 'This is going to hurt,' she warned him and was almost certain she caught the faintest of eye rolls from him in response, 'I need to clean the wound properly.'
It was unpleasant to say the least. The smell was unendingly foul as she swabbed away pus and infected juices from the wound site but Ashe didn't stop dousing the wound and wiping it clean until fresh blood began to well from the bullet hole. Balthier was shivering violently by this point but he hadn't said a word against her actions. In fact he'd barely made a peep even though it had to have hurt him a great deal.
Ashe dropped the filthy bandages and reached up a hand, from her position knelt between his legs as he perched precariously on the edge of her bathtub, so that she could touch his face. The pirate was burning up, his sharp features drawn taut and the bones seeming to stand out in famine relief against his chalk white, sweat slicked and blazing hot skin.
'What have you done to yourself?' she asked him dismayed as her mind raced ahead of her.
She was almost sure his fever meant that the infection from his bullet wound had entered his blood stream and Balthier clearly needed to see a trained healer or physician immediately. Unfortunately Balthier's presence here, uninvited in her private chambers, meant that he had obviously gone to some effort even in his condition to sneak into the palace undetected. Plus Balthier was a pirate and a queen shouldn't really be fetching doctors to tend to her injured pirate friend. Truthfully speaking Ashe was not sure she could even count Balthier as a friend – at least not anymore.
Ashe swore softly to herself; damn the pirate for dropping his problems into her lap. Who all she knew it was her own guardsmen who had shot at him as he tried to steal from her citizenry.
'Come on; get up.' She ordered briskly rising to her feet and tugging on Balthier's good arm while trying not to aggravate his wounds. The pirate looked up at her glassy eyed and Ashe wondered how long he was going to be able to stay conscious.
'Balthier get up, you can't stay here.'
He seemed to blink at her and she watched the visible effort it took him to marshal his thoughts. He nodded his head in one jerky motion and rather awkwardly looped his good arm around her shoulders. Ashe staggered under his unexpected weight (Balthier was a big man, and although not as muscular as Basch or even Vaan, he was still more weight than Ashe, many inches shorter than he, could easily manage).
To the pirate's credit after he had managed to lever himself up off the rim of the bathtub he did try to take most of his weight onto himself, but it soon became apparent that the deep raw and weeping abrasions that decorated his whole right torso, must also travel down his leg, for he limped painfully.
It seemed to take an age to get him to her bed and then, when she was about to shove him down onto the counterpane he resisted her. 'No,' he shook his head letting go of her to brace a hand against the carven post of her bed, 'No, this was a mistake. I have to go.'
Ashe snorted in less than regal fashion and rather unkindly shoved him (but on his good side) until he toppled onto her bed with a less than manly whimper. 'Balthier you are not going anywhere. Frankly I'm surprised you're not dead already.'
The pirate was forced to smirk at that, if only for a second, and that one curl of his lips made Ashe feel just fractionally better.
'Well,' he mumbled, swaying as he sat on the side of her bed, 'at least fetch some towels that I can lie on,' he looked up at her with pain filled but sardonic eyes, 'I'm in enough trouble without committing the crime of soiling the sheets of a Dynast Queen's bed.'
Ashe did just that and eventually she had the pirate lying on his back on a collection of fluffy white towels laid over her bed sheets. He was grey in pallor by this point and panting hard enough that she might have imagined he had just outrun a herd of furious Wu upon the Ozmone Plains.
Ashe settled herself on the bed beside him with a damp cloth; she swept it over his perspiring brow. 'Balthier I need to know what has happened. You need to see a healer, but I can't afford to court scandal by aiding you if you have been hurt in some foolish caper gone awry.'
Ashe did not particularly like herself as the words left her mouth. She did not forget that Balthier and Fran had perhaps single-handedly saved Rabanastre from utter destruction by piloting the Bahamut away from the city's paling, but as queen she followed the edicts of a higher calling and Balthier was a criminal with a bounty on his head.
Ashe blinked as she suddenly came to wonder for the first time where Balthier's Viera partner was.
'Balthier – where is Fran?' Ashe could hear the deep thumping of her own heart as the pirate's eyes snapped open to meet hers, 'Balthier?'
She asked again ice water filling her veins; the two sky pirates were inseparable. She could not imagine that Balthier would be staggering around in this state if Fran was alive and well, but the thought that some harm could have come to the Viera left Ashe almost light headed with fear.
The light of fevered panic sparking behind the pirate's eyes did nothing to reassure Ashe. 'It isn't true.' He told her tightly and suddenly his hand was wrapped around her wrist, fingers digging in tightly and squeezing down on the bone.
'What isn't true?' Ashe tried to peel his hand off her but he wouldn't let go, 'Balthier you are hurting me – let go.'
The pirate only then seemed to realise he was gripping her wrist so tightly and he let go of her almost reluctantly. She watched some unknowable emotion dance over his pallid features until he turned his head away. She watched him take in a deep shaking breath and release it. She thought that the tremor running through his limbs was not symptomatic of his fever alone.
'I don't believe it, they are lying.' He whispered almost too quietly for Ashe to hear and with none of his usual verbose poetry. Ashe found herself leaning forward, leaning across Balthier's body, to hear him.
'Who is lying? Balthier what has happened to you, and where is Fran?'
'I don't know,' he whispered eyes closed and head turned away from her as he clenched his left fist in a knot of her bed sheet, managing to soil her bedding with his bloody palm despite his insistence on precautions against such.
'You don't know who shot and beat you?' Ashe asked him completely confused.
'No,' Balthier turned back to her with an almost frustrated petulance. 'No I mean that I do not know where Fran is.' He snapped, raising his left hand to scratch at his sweat sodden hair, managing to paint his face with his own blood, like some sort of primitive tribal brand.
'They have taken her, I'm sure of it. I don't, I won't, believe their lies.' He bit out heatedly.
'Balthier I cannot understand you.'
Ashe had never seen the pirate so undone. This was a man who was suave and debonair while inside a falling sky fortress. The pirate literally laughed in the face of death as an occupational norm. Now he was bleeding all over her bath towels and talking nonsense.
'They say I killed her.' Balthier breathed out raggedly ignoring Ashe's confusion in favour of venting his own. He turned to look straight up at her and his fever wild eyes were dark with a crashing fear.
'They say I murdered Fran.'