Chapter Twenty-Five: Cid's legacy; a son betrayed
A/N: To everyone who is reading and reviewing, as always much thanks and gratitude to you all and welcome to the biggest, most continuity shaking plot-twist I have ever inflicted on you, my long-suffering readers ;)
He was not completely sure when his tormentors ran out of sadistic inspiration and left him in peace and in truth it did not really matter; he was just glad of the peace and quiet.
As it was Professor Kry had yet to request an audience with him and so, with little to do but gather dust and mildew sitting in his dark, musty, overly hot walled up cell, Balthier did something he was rather good at...he made plans.
These plans were not the elaborate, complex, devious schemes for a heroic escape and revenge upon his captors that might have been expected, or deemed appropriate, considering his predicament; instead Balthier ignored his current lack of liberty and his precarious state of health and assumed that in some way or other he would soon be free once more.
Thus the plans he made involved a much deserved holiday.
He had been toying with the notion of packing Ashe and children into the Strahl and flying over to a little purveema he knew of, which had some truly lovely scenery and a number of freshwater lakes. Sitting in his cramped and confined quarters (the subjugation to total surrender had had the effect of gaining Basch his freedom and Balthier out of his chains...so altogether not such a bad thing so far) Balthier amused himself with forming an itinerary of activities and entertainments for this imaginary holiday.
Of course extracting the queen from her kingdom, even for a few days, was not going to be an easy matter but Balthier was confident in his ability to persuade Ashe, and the children would love every minute of it.
He indulged his mind in happy distraction for a few more minutes (or hours...he had lost all sense of time) knowing that as holistically invigorating as it was to raise his thoughts above his rank and unpleasant state and circumstance, he would soon need to face reality once more.
Balthier shifted, raising one knee up to his chest and folding his arms over it, as he propped his chin upon said knee. As he thought his fingers began to dig into the tight stitching of the knee of his old, worn leather trousers and the thickened patch of treated leather that acted as knee guard.
During his confinement, and especially since Basch had left and he had time to think in peaceful solitude, Balthier had had the time to reflect on recent events in some detail and had drawn a number of conclusions.
There was something wrong with him.
This was the fundamental and primary revelation that had been sneaking up upon him ever since he had briefly foresworn his memory (the irony of the situation being that he could remember everything he had said and felt during that brief period when he had forgotten all). The disturbing point of it was that when without his memory Balthier had felt, ironically enough, more himself than he had prior to, and immediately after, his spell of amnesia.
Thus on careful consideration he had to concede that the rankling suspicion that had motivated him to do something so seemingly moronic as walk into a trap that could rob of him of his wits had been right on the Gil.
There was something wrong with his mind and there had been for some time.
His musing on a holiday was not entirely the idle distraction it seemed but a piece in a puzzle that had been before him all along but for some reason he had persistently put the pieces together in the wrong order.
Why had he waited so long to take his wife and children on a holiday he knew he had been planning for sometime...why was it that although he had planned to take the twins to the Phon Coast to show them the ocean for the first time upon the advent of their fourth birthday he had not done so?
Balthier was a man who always achieved his wants and desires, even when seemingly insurmountable odds stood before him, now, arguable one of the most influential men in all Ivalice, very little could stand before him and his desires and yet, what had he done with his life for the last year, or two years?
The answer was, essentially, dishearteningly, staggeringly little.
Oh, he had the Nalbina aerodrome restoration and the Inventor's Guild he was helping to establish, and the Guild of Moggle Artificers, which he was now benefactor of (a goal he had cherished since his boyhood, to be the first Hume benefactor and member of the vaulted Moogle organisation) but it now seemed to Balthier that he had been in a state of ennui, or inertia, for some time.
Ennui and inertia were not native states to his being; if he was unhappy he tended to either do something about or run away from the problem (or occasional both). Thus the only conclusion that could logically be drawn was that, either he had become old before his time, or (and he liked this one more) something within his mind but not of his mind had exerted a detrimental effect upon him and stolen his old passion.
Although it took some work and his nails broke and cracked, he finally managed to break apart the seam over his knee and slipped his fingers between the rough pad of protective leather covering the rest of the trouser over his knee; his fingers brushed against the two coins he kept in there for just such occasions as this.
The light was poor and Balthier's eyesight was not what it once was (bloody hereditary short-sightedness – he would soon need spectacles to pilot the Strahl) but he did not need to see the faces on these coins for he had designed them and knew precisely what they were...the missing Quidion of Betrayal and Mind.
Eleven years ago when he had hit upon the notion of manufacturing a bone-fide sky pirate legend it had occurred to him that said legend would gain credence and validity if some of the cache were to be 'missing'. However he nevertheless had the whole set of twenty six coins, or two sets of thirteen Quidion, made at the same time as at some point, he had decided, it might be necessary to 'discover' the full set.
One set of Quidion, with all thirteen coins present and accountable, he had hidden and eventually (when he believed it unlikely anyone would believe he had made the whole thing up) entrusted to Hamish' care.
The other coins, or the incomplete set, had already been distributed amongst his peers, and Balthier had found himself entrusted with the coin of Artifice (which was more apropos than Rikken could ever know). Because it would have been expected of a scurvy knave such as he, Balthier had then had yet another copy of the Artifice coin made, which he had given to Ashe before venturing to Archades.
(Sometimes the lengths he went to in the name of raging paranoia disturbed even him, but then something like this happened and he discovered that one could never be paranoid enough.)
Mind and Betrayal, the 'missing coins', Balthier had sewn into his favourite pair of travelling trousers (and repeated the process many times over the years as his trousers needed replacing); in fact he had had them kicking about, hidden in his shin guard, so long he had all but forgotten the reason he put them in their in the first place.
Paranoia; the paranoia of a man who ran and ran some more to escape the manipulations of a father he worshipped, and the fear that he could fall victim to the same, from another source in the future.
Everything Balthier was and had ever done sprang from that hot, red, jagged fear of being used...of becoming no more than a tool in the machinations and ambitions of others.
He had killed to prevent anyone from using him for any reason; he had lied and deceived, and yes, become the user of others and everything he despised, to make damned sure no one could ever, ever again, turn him into something he hated.
Turning the coins over in his palm again and again, Balthier was forced to face the real and genuine fear that sat like a stale vomit in the back of his throat and roiled his gut like gall stones, that he had been used; that his mind and his actions had not been his own, and perhaps not for some time.
Basch had called him a traitor, had declared that he had betrayed Ashe by protecting his father's work...Balthier knew he was right and the monstrous part of it was, that he no longer remembered why he had acted in such a way; it made no sense, almost as if something else had made him do it.
Mind and Betrayal the one intrinsically linked to the other. I think therefore I can be deceived, the great fragility of ego. Balthier sometimes thought that he could drive himself quite stark raving bonkers all the times he tried to plot against finding himself betrayed or manipulated...because how could one ever truly know it was happening until it was already too late?
Still, Balthier shook himself, beginning to toss the two coins from hand to hand in the dark. He had done everything he could to, essentially, sabotage himself. The gods alone knew that a fool trusts his friends and the truly wise man trusts no one, especially himself.
Balthier had absolutely no plan for escaping the Pharos (and he must be fool indeed, placing his faith for continued existence in the hands of the ever capable Fran and the less than friendly Basch). He did not really know how to handle Kry, and suspected that if Kry had brought him here to kill him then Balthier would have little viable option other than to do just that, but that was not the battle Balthier was fighting right now.
He had accepted, about the time he had first held his son and daughter in his arms that he would, at some unspecified point in time, die. Strangely, holding Heios and Hallie in his arms, and rocking them to sleep, he had found that death, while hardly something to be viewed with a smile, was not so bad...his lasting legacy was warm and perfect in his arms.
Dying at the hands of a man like Kry would be galling to his ego (but, Balthier was forced to concede, his ego probably deserved it) but ultimate there was a certain beauty and symmetry to dying in the place his father had, sacrificed in place of Cid.
No, what threatened to send him spiralling into a cataclysm of terror was the idea that something...other...had played him like a fiddle to lead him to his slaughter. There was something wrong with his mind, he knew this because he had sensed it for years, a gnawing canker in the dreams he could not remember when he woke.
He curled his fist tightly around the two coins; he knew how to evoke their joint power, all deceptions revealed, all that was locked in his mind released, yet he hesitated to do so.
It was not fear, because truly he feared suspecting but not knowing far more than finding the truth at last. Instead he simply wanted to take a moment to consider his lot; to accept a punishment he no doubt had earned.
In the hot, close, silent darkness of the walled up cell, the air rank with the scent of his own over ripe body (he would forgo dignity and ego for a nice bath about now) Balthier pictured the faces of his children and cast his mind upon a course that he knew was untainted by whatever poison had infected his reason.
He was a selfish bastard and a habitual manipulator and deceiver, he would declare that proudly and unashamed (for what good would false shame do when it had ever been his choice to so sully himself with constant plotting and paranoia?) but he had but one saving grace...he knew how to love.
He loved his family. He loved Ashe, he loved Hallie and he loved Heios. He loved Fran (soulmate, best friend, the debt he owed to her was only equal to the things he would give onto her if he could). He believed, because a man has to have a little faith, that he could never be induced to betray them.
With the delicate brush strokes and gilded touch of affectionate memory Balthier recreated out of the darkness and filth that surrounded him the face of his Queen. He saw her frowning, he saw her sleeping, and he saw her laughing, joyously and without restraint, on their wedding day.
He remembered the separate occasions of the twins' first words, and all he had learned of the people they would be. He remembered that both his bonny children had resisted the cliché of 'mama' or 'papa' and instead defined themselves as intellects to be reckoned with on their first utterance.
Hallie had spoken one day while building a castle out of painted wooden blocks under her mother's careful supervision as he read a book in a wing chair and covertly watched them both.
After abruptly and seemingly meaninglessly demolishing her brick palace Hallie had slapped her own chest and proudly, with utmost authority, piped up with 'Hawwie!'
Balthier remembered that he'd dropped his book in surprise and Ashe had just blinked as Hallie, clearly unimpressed with their response, had repeated the process of slapping her chest and once more declared herself, 'Hawwie'.
Heios, by contrast had had little inclination to proclaim his name and assert his presence with his first word, which came some time after Hallie had discovered all manner of verbal commands and demands.
One day Heios had been in the company of his mother and father while they entertained the visiting Empress of Archadia. Penelo had gone to greet Heios and with simple, quiet solemnity Heios had said, quite perfectly: 'Hello.'
Balthier had made himself promise never to forget, or underestimate, the importance of those memories. He cherished them daily, and so long as he could die with those in mind he would die knowing his life had not been entirely ill-spent or in vain.
With his children's first words, and a thousand snapshots of their growing, enshrined within the backdrop of his mind Balthier clenched his fist around those two coins until the rounded edges gouged into his flesh and blood, sharp and hot, dripped from his clenched fist.
He had to go deeper, further back in mind and memory, to find the place where the rot set in. He no longer trusted himself or his reason, but no manipulation, no matter how well done, could break him swiftly (if he could defy his father he could defy the will of anyone – this he knew).
As carefully, but forcefully, as he had peeled back the secret panel in his clothes Balthier peeled the protective covering from his mind and unleashed that coruscating, tumultuous maelstrom that was his own personal abyss of memory.
The abyss yawned open and a hundred million petty hurts that he had inflicted on others or suffered at the hands of his foes, swirled into shimmering life, stabbing at him with renewed vigour now that he allowed himself to feel them.
He remembered the little boy he had been, sheltered and home schooled until his tenth year when his father enrolled him in the Akademy. He remembered the schoolyard beatings he received because he was too wealthy, too clever, too well-dressed and most of all too different from the other children.
He remembered the coldness, the indifference, and disdain he had learned while enduring (and keeping secret from a father who would view his victimisation as a fault in him) those beatings.
He learned to hate people then and he learned that he did not need friends. He did not really need anyone, save those people he could use for his own purposes or buy with false flattery and promises that were not worth the breath he used to make them.
As he fell more deeply into the nasty, fetid depths of his secret mind, Balthier found Fran once more, who erased almost all the lessons of his previous life simply with her presence. Fran taught him that he might not need a friend, but he much preferred to have one and a better person he was in the having.
She taught him, by acquiescing to participate in his mad schemes that he could be good, almost noble, and it didn't have to be a lie.
Balthier was both surprised and not to find Ashe's likeness here in the abyss as well. The mother of his children she had demanded his fealty, paid for it, and then, once the bargain was concluded, refused to play by his rules; so now he played by hers.
He had long since given up any notion that he resented her for all she had given him (and all the pointlessness of his existence she had robbed him of) and he could not really imagine a time when he would look elsewhere for a bed partner. Still as much as he knew that Ashe was at the heart of the matter (because if any external force could enter his mind and change his will, it was she) he knew that Ashe herself was not the answer.
He needed to go deeper.
As his blood dripped from his sweaty, stinging palm and he squeezed his eyes closed so that the weak darkness of the cell could not alleviate the black rainbow colours of his mental abyss, Balthier used his free hand to reach for his feet (scabrous and gaining infection where his bare burned soles had been forced to tread dirty floor) without hesitation, for what was pain but an indulgence of the flesh? He dug his fingers into those open sores.
His descent to the very depths of the abyss increased as a surge of fresh, clean, bright pain, a blue-white sword of agony, lanced through him and increased his velocity.
He knew where he needed to go.
'Cid, you bastard, where are you?'
A memory opened like a lotus flower, bitter sweet, and tinted with half-remembered mania and delusion. Archades after his rescue from Ashe's insane cousin Joaquin, burning up with fever from his chest wound.
He remembered, vaguely, in that way of hallucination, where colours are too bright and sounds too soft and stilted, arguing with Ashe (scratch that, he remembered being a total bastard to her, but alas, that was not unique). Yet something else had happened that made this memory more than just a source of shame...
His father...no, not his father, but an apparition of Dr Cid (and he always made the distinction. Dr Cid, as he had been at his death, was a different beast to the man who had shaped and defined Ffamran's youth) had come to him, speaking words that had been forgotten except within the abyss, words that only had relevance in retrospect.
Ffamran, we shall need Ashelia B'Nargin Dalmasca if we are to progress with our plans for Nabudis. We cannot have you upsetting the young queen with a case of the pre-marriage jitters, now, can we?
Cold sweat hit the air as it coated Balthier's body, while his mind furiously ripped itself apart to find a truth more dangerous than any of his lies.
Mind otherwise engaged his body was free to react to the stress of what he did to himself. Muscles went into spasm and his breathing became harsh and short. He shook as he hunched his shoulders and wrapped his arms around himself.
'Nonononononononono,' it was a mantra that went unheard as Balthier tore himself apart, segment by segment, memory by memory, rooting out the truth, trying to find the puppet master who had so masterfully taken up his strings and jerked and pulled until he no longer knew himself.
How many times had he dreamed or imagined Dr Cid? How many times had he heard that hale and hearty voice booming in the quiet, unprotected places of his mind? How long had a ghost wearing Cid's visage haunted him?
From one bitter memory to the outer depths of all that he kept hidden even from himself did Balthier leap, blind and unprepared.
He was falling through the years and like the sedimentary striations within mountains, and the rings of great trees, he saw himself in all his guises until he found his feet somewhere he had not expected to be ever again.
'Must I do everything myself?'
And Fran was once more half-buried under smouldering, twisted wreckage as the Bahamut, determined to make final communion with the desert floor, groaned and rocked itself to pieces on its descent, and the Princess screamed his name through a wall of static.
Heaving the metal girder off Fran he blanched to see the damage done her. Bone protruded from her lower leg and when he touched her hip she shuddered in a reflex of pain that stole the breath from her scream.
He lifted her as carefully as he could and began to move as swiftly as he was able towards the higher reaches of the sky fortress, where there might be some small chance of surviving the impact once Bahamut came to its final resting place.
He could no longer hear the Princess' screams and did not know if this was because the transmission feed had broken or if she had simply given up; he supposed it did not precisely matter.
Most of the personnel he met as he staggered through the fortress were either dead, dying, or puddles of panic on the floor and thus proved neither to be of assistance or hindrance.
Resting Fran, as carefully as he could, mindful of her shattered body, against a wall somewhere in the mid-level of the Bahamut, where he predicted they would have most chance of surviving, Balthier set about prying loss the wall panels. The Bahamut had an inner and outer hull, and the walls were hollow to allow Mist conducts to run like arteries through the structure (he had gathered that along the way to meet Vayne) he and Fran could ride out the crash inside the walls.
He tore apart his hands and fingers to some less than pleasant degree while he was trying to tear off the wall panel, but as this was considerably less significant than either Fran's suffering, or that which they would face should they be unsheltered when Bahamut hit rock bottom, Balthier was not overly concerned.
He was thus unprepared and more than a little shocked when, for no practical reason, a dangly vein of Mist cable dropped, with the slithering grace of something alive, to loop about his neck.
Jolted and startled Balthier reached up with bloodied hands to pull the cord off him and it was at that moment that the blasted thing discharged its semi gaseous, semi-liquid, white hot fuel all over his hands.
Balthier screamed as acid heat burned through flesh and tendon and muscle to corrode the bones in his hands.
As he collapsed, hands held against his chest, and mind blank to all else but the excruciating, corrosive agony lighting up his entire being, his eyes (and the part of his mind that saw everything even while he slept) recorded the truth that his conscious mind would never remember.
The Mist was not Mist, or at least not entirely, and the burning, scorching, acid-like substance that leached through eroded pores and seared into his nervous system was not merely fuel.
Just briefly before the absorption (the infection) was complete an inhume like mirage shimmered palely into existence. An almost triangular shaped thing with no head and no neck and no visible face, a solid shard of nightmare, roped and eradiated with pale lights, seemed to look down upon the suffering Balthier with something like distant satisfaction.
'Undying; from the father to the son I will go.'
Balthier woke from his dream-like discovery white skinned and bloodless, coated in ice and sweat. Bile rose to his throat and he lurched forward to void the content of his stomach (not that there was all that much within). Gagging and choking on harsh, liquid burning panic, Balthier's mind floundered and was rendered to pieces on the rocks of the abyss.
He could not see in the darkness but he stared down at his hands all the same; seeing in his mind's eye the faded rosette pink and white splotches of those old burns with new understanding and new horror.
He had known something was wrong.
He had known something was wrong with him; when he had held his children he had first sensed that something in him could taint them.
Thus he had given the coins to Hamish. He had kept secret, even from Fran, his discovery of the workings of the Waystone, and more recently, he had even endeavoured to lose his memory in the hopes of dislodging the interloper within his thoughts.
Finally when all else failed and he began to see how he had been made to betray himself and all he believed (for how else could he explain gathering the sun Cryst shards, stealing his father's research papers; guarding Dr Cid's most heinous crimes from discovery?) he had given his trust to a man who disliked him because whom else could he trust to watch him when he no longer trusted himself?
All this he had done, almost subconsciously, because he knew he was being used; he knew that something was wrong...but he had never imagined...not that...never, never...not like father...
The darkness of the cell was shattered and parted by eldritch, pale and sickly lights, and a scent like burning Mist and tin clogged the already over-pungent air. Gritting his teeth against either tears of fright or screams of murderous rage Balthier lifted his head to meet the blind regard of his faceless puppet master:
'So it was you all along...Venat.'