Chapter Five: Mirror, mirror on the wall who is the maddest of them all?
A/N: the motivation for most of this story has been the question how did Ffamran become Balthier, what was the catalyst that forced him to up sticks and run from his home? How much of the Balthier we all know is real and how much is deliberate artifice - what goes on in the head of a man who introduces himself as a conceit of popular fiction? This story is my attempt to answer those questions.
Ffamran studied his reflection in the mirror in his bedroom intently.
Behind him, covering his bedspread in a loose skein, were dozens of crumpled pieces of paper, an assortment of quills and stylus and a set square and ruler and other mathematical drawing aids.
Under the bed were twenty three medium sized sacks each containing somewhere in the region of one thousand to five thousand Gil.
It had taken him three weeks of careful, slow, deliberate embezzlement to first forge Ghis' signature on the payment release forms and then make his 'collections' of the Gil in small consignments that would not be noticed or viewed as suspicious, from the department's treasury.
It had been, once he plucked up the nerve to enact the plan, disgustingly easy.
Unfortunately now that he had successfully robbed the Judiciary department of a respectably shocking amount of Gil he had no idea what he planned to do with it.
Thus he was staring fixedly into his mirror waiting for his reflection to inform him of the next stage in their plan.
With the movements of one possessed Ffamran picked up a wooden backed hair brush and started to backcomb the fringe of short, wiry, vaguely curling, mousey hair that habitually fell over his forehead.
He brushed that hair straight up, away from his forehead, and observed the difference in his appearance.
Ffamran watched as his reflection, freshly coiffed to his liking, affected a rather knowing and confident smirk upon his lips.
' Hello Ffamran, been busy have we?' His reflection purred.
' What are we to do with the Gil?'
In contrast to the rich, self confident purring of his alter-ego, Ffamran winced to hear his own flat, defeated tones.
'Tsk-tsk.' His reflection shook his head mockingly, ' Hasty aren't we?'
'I cannot just sit around with over a hundred thousand Gil under the mattress!'
'Why not?' His reflection inquired, silencing Ffamran
' It seems to me you could use a good night's sleep.' His reflection added slyly.
'Chance would be a fine thing in this household.' Ffamran retorted, growing irritated with the nonchalant and vacuous tone his reflection was taking with him.
His reflection winced and something vaguely sympathetic flittered through his shuttered brown eyes.
'Quite the sorry state, aren't we?'
Ffamran frowned, ' What do you mean by that?' He asked guardedly.
His reflection had something of a sharp, dark wit that Ffamran had come to be both wary of and impressed with.
His reflection quirked an eyebrow expressively, ' What do I mean? I don't mean anything because I do not exist.'
Ffamran opened his mouth to demand a better explanation than that and his reflection, who currently lacked a name for itself, beat him to it; as was so often the case.
' You do realise, of course, that you are talking to yourself? It is symptomatic of how sundered you have become that you no longer know your own mind. We are almost as bad as the old man.'
Ffamran nodded, letting out a long held breath that his reflected self shared. ' I do not think Father's madness is quite the same.'
'No.' He and his reflection had a moment of shared pain as they thought upon the man whose madness was directly responsible for Ffamran's own increasingly fragmentary sense of self.
It was his own fault, Ffamran knew, for having devoted himself to being everything Cid could want from a son and having fallen, evidently, so far off the mark that his Father had taken to talking to himself as a replacement.
Briefly he wondered if Cid had spent hours pondering these very questions while staring at a stranger in a mirror who shared his face.
'Don't worry,' His reflection cooed soothingly with Ffamran's own voice but without Ffamran's ever encroaching despair.
'Just do everything I tell you Ffamran and soon you and I will be free.'
Ffamran stared into the mirror almost fearfully and slowly watched that other self, the person who was not Ffamran Mid Bunansa in anyway shape or form except in appearance fade away.
Ffamran was left staring into his own, dazed, blinkered dark eyes which sought to be blind to the destruction of everything he held dear, he saw his own tired features contort into a mask of anguish.
He slammed his fist into the mirror and watched the glass splinter into shards with something like satisfaction, at least now it gave an accurate reflection of his state of being.
Vaguely Ffamran became aware of the glass slivers embedded in his knuckles and frowned.
It was, he thought bitterly, damned unfair that Cid could be mad and cheerful with it and Ffamran himself (who was clearly equally deranged even by Bunansa standards) was so interminably miserable.
His reflection was waiting for him in the mirror when he stumbled into the bathroom in search of another cure potion.
' Oh, very nice, Ffamran.'
His reflection sneered, lips curled up over perfect white teeth and eyes simmering with superiority.
' That's just what we need, another Bunansa lunatic.'
Ffamran ignored his reflection and worked on easing the splinters of glass from his hand before imbibing the potion, it would not do to have the flesh heal over the glass.
'He won't care you know.'
His other self drawled, the same voice that lurked in the back of his mind and whispered constantly to Ffamran of escape and a new beginning, the chance to stop being Ffamran and try his luck with a different life.
'It's far too late now. Nothing you do will ever interest him again. You are obsolete Ffamran, forgotten. You have served your purpose and he needs you no more.'
The voice, smooth as silk and honey seeped into his soul and congealed in his heart, clogging his arteries with the hated truth, spoken with such distain that it seemed to Ffamran that his whole existence truly was nothing more than what he feared.
Utterly and completely pointless.
What was left for a son when his father did not love him anymore?
Slowly and with unintended pathos that his mirror self appreciated even as Ffamran failed to see the drama of it all, he leaned his head against the glass of the mirror and squeezed his eyes closed.
'I can leave soon?' Ffamran whispered.
'Oh, yes, the more you break the stronger I become.' His other self, the reflection that would usurp him, assured him.
'And who are you?' Ffamran thought he should at least have a name, this figment of his imagination that would take over when Ffamran could keep going no longer.
He heard his reflection chuckle, a surprisingly insidious sound. ' Oh, I don't have a name yet, when the time comes we'll know who I shall be.'
Ffamran opened his eyes and from half an inch away he stared into his reflections eye, eyelashes brushing the cool surface of the mirror.
'When the time comes.'
He repeated straightening up and spending a few minutes putting his dishevelled self to rights. At least he still looked sane.
Without a backwards glance towards the mirror and the shadow self contained within, Ffamran left the bathroom and headed down the wide staircase towards another agonising and surreal supper with his father and his father's delusion.
He amused himself idly with the notion of introducing reflected Ffamran to his father's imaginary friend. Perhaps if his father knew Ffamran had dutifully followed him into complete insanity the man might actually deign to meet his son's eyes once in a while?
'Hardly.' His usurper sneered in the back of his mind.
'You waste your time even hoping. Face it, Ffamran, you are weak and you are useless and, really, you are so much better off letting me take over. I dare say I shall make a better job of your life than you ever could.'
Ffamran might have argued, except then he would be arguing with himself and there were still some lines he would not cross; at least publicly.