Hey everybody! Glad you all liked last chapter. "..." raised a good point, which is that earlier I'd claimed she was evil. She is... but after you write Mateus' chapter, you really need to cleanse the system, so to speak. I needed to write a "evil Shemhazai" chapter, but couldn't bring myself to do it.

Henceforth, Good Shemhazai came forth. Not a bad chapter.

With any luck, though, the evilness will be made up for when I write Ultima's chapter. Stay tuned. :)

Shout-outs to new reviewers! Dynast-Kid, B.Szoke, Mighty Crouton, Asmi-chan, and morgan colbourne! Thanks for reviewing!

Wow, everybody likes the Esper chapters. I'm kind of glad you do... I always thought that the Espers, Belias in particular, needed a voice.

I mean, c'mon, the guy's got two heads. Least we can do for him. ;)

This chapter, we begin everyone's favorite earring-wearing smooth-talking blond-haired sky pirate!

(If you say Vaan, you're wrong!)

With that, it's now...

"SHOWTIME!"

A Father's Pride

One time, long ago, little Ffamran looked at his daddy

(I want to be just like him he thought, with a beard and glasses and everything)

and asked him what made some men use swords and some men use guns.

(Like my daddy! Little Ffamran would think, upon hearing this sentence.)

" Because, my dear son," his daddy said, in a great deep voice that his son loved to hear, " some men like to fight and some like to study. And if you study, you don't have time to fight, so you have to find a weapon that can support you anyway. A sword is a weapon for a man who fights and a gun is a weapon for a man who doesn't."

" So which is better?" Little Ffamran asked, eyes wide. He just knows his daddy is going to say guns, because Daddy has guns, great big pistols that look beautiful to young Ffamran's eyes and shine and sparkle. Cid at this point has killed nothing intelligent and only a few of the monsters that assault everyone around the city of Archades.

" Depends, " Cid said with a big smile on his face, " but that's for another night. Because now," a little wink, and Ffamran is scooped up before he can speak, " you have to go to bed."

And then he playfully struggled with Ffamran all the way up to the boy's bed in the upper room.

It is this memory- and those like it- that plague the man named Balthier. It is the good memories, and not the bad ones, that hurt him the most.

But he remembers them anyway, because there's far too much happiness in those memories- the same happiness that has driven Balthier to seek his freedom in the skies- for him to ever forget, and they are the reason that the weapon lying next to him is a sword.

So in that place between wakefulness and sleep, his turn at watch over for the night, Balthier dreams.

-

" Son," Cid says, and little Ffamran, who's a teenager at this point and less shy than a drunk Seeq (and having made his way into the diaries of far too many young ladies for the peace of mind of the fathers of Archades), listens to him. " I've noticed you looking at the judges lately."

Ffamran nods. The judges are everything he wants to be- men with the authority and the power to change the world. He has seen what his father has done in his area of work, seen him build things no one else could ever envision. He wants to be like his father, change the world, and because he will not overstep his father in the field of design, he will do so in the realm of law. Ffamran will, if he can, write his name on the stage of history.

(Childhood dreams are always real, and we can always achieve them if we try. Balthier simply managed to fulfill his in a somewhat different way than he had originally imagined it.)

Ffamran has taken naturally to physical training and has- somewhat on the sly- begun to study weapons, though he doesn't have a favorite yet. He's actually pretty good with all of them, if his training with a certain streetear is to be believed.

" However," Cid says, looking at his young son

(I can't let him know how damn proud I am of him, he thinks, so young and strong and smart)

" I refuse to let you have Jules teach you anymore."

Ffamran nearly chokes. That was... surprising. He'd thought no one, much less his father, knew. Cid tries not to smile as he continues before Ffamran, who almost always has something to say, can speak.

" And so I will teach you fighting myself."

The father's been taking training on the sly too.

His just happens to be from Judge Magister Bergan. Cid won't ever be a swordsman of any count, but he'll be damned before he lets some streetear teach his child anything.

Ffamran, a teenager who could think up a comment in the face of the devil, is at a loss for words.

Cid smiles as he takes two wooden training swords out of a box near him and tosses one to his teenaged son.

Bet I'm still tougher than he is, Cid thinks with a grin as he begins to walk forward for him and his son's first lesson together.

Turned out he was, too.

-

My father, Balthier thinks as he drifts in and out of sleep and waking both, was really, really quick with a sword but couldn't use a shield to save his life.

It is in these peaceful moments that Balthier forgets that someday, he may have to use that knowledge to kill his own father.

(Sometimes, he wonders if he will ever find a concept in his life more defining than the idea that my father has gone insane.)

And so Balthier practiced, and one of those little jokes of fate came around to it- because Bergan only used swords and would barely acquiesce to using a shield in his off-hand, Cid never learned other fighting styles. And Balthier was trained by Cid, so he never trained in anything else. But he didn't want to. He liked sword and shield training, liked that you could block and then kill, because it fit with his theatrical sensibility. It was flashy, somehow, this ability to block their attacks like it was nothing and then strike them dead in the blink of an eye. Two weapons in each hand seemed dramatic, as well, because Cid taught him to be aggressive with it, and he learned that the only difference between a shield and a sword is that one cuts and the other bashes.

(Once, surrounded by enemy forces, Balthier managed to kill three members of a Rozarrian scout force- never let it be said that the borders of empires are not prodded daily- with just his shield alone, his sword having been lost in the surprise attack. It was the highlight of his career and earned him a medal.)

Balthier was one of only a hundred judges to ever come out of the Akademy who'd never been trained by an actual arms master, and like all those hundred, it was his father who taught him how to fight. Unlike those other hundred, however, Balthier's father wasn't a judge to begin with.

(Zargabaath's dad was a Magister before him, as his grandmother was before him, and her father before her. Zargabaath plans to raise his daughter the same way. Some things never change.)

Balthier loved his sword and shield, because, to tell truth, it fit with his own personality. Keep a bit of yourself back, and then strike. A lot like him, really, and he liked that.

His father was quite proud of him, because after the fifth practice session he never beat his son at swordplay again.

Balthier drifts off a final time, and a third dream, one that makes him squeeze his eyes tight in memory, takes hold.

-

" Son," Cid says, and he's smiling, huge grin through the beard like white pillars in a field of brown grass. " You've done it. You're a judge now."

" Yes, Father," little Ffamran says, except now he's bigger than his father and the armor makes him look even larger, like a dragon disguised as a man. He's done it, he's made it. He's a judge, and tears are running down his cheeks even though he told himself he would not cry. He takes a second to bless the helmet on his head, because he'd be embarassed for his father to see him cry. He, Ffamran, the genius son of Dr. Cidolfus Bunansa, does not cry. Not much, anyway.

His father is so proud of him.

" And now!" Cid laughs, stepping back as he looks proudly at the son who has become a man. " A gift!"

And before his son's eyes, Cid unveils a sword of such startling beauty that Ffamran almost weeps again. Next to it is a shield.

" For you," Cid says, and smiles again, and his son weeps beneath his helm.

Quietly.

(It wouldn't do to forget propriety.)

-

It is these memories that Balthier keeps quiet within him when he wakes in the morning, roused by whoever their watch is, to step out into the brand new day and pit himself against the Empire. That past is the reason he has a sword and a shield.

But he keeps them now for a different reason. The latter memories are the ones that made him take up the sword, the stuff of legends and dreams. Swords are the weapons of heroes, or so he thought, and shields are, likewise, something all great heroes have ever had.

(Balthier's years watching the theater in Archades have never left him.)

But it is the idea that swords are weapons of destruction that keeps Balthier using them. That first memory has become the reason for his choice. The man who once was Ffamran is meant to destroy, to wipe out, to eliminate the evils of his own father from the world. And for that reason he cannot wield a gun, a weapon of protection, because that is not what he is here for. He is here to destroy.

And so strapped to his side is the sword his father left him so many years ago.

It was always his choice.

-R&R please!