Chapter Twenty-Eight: Seekers Without Answers; Fran's Story Pt. One

A/N: It's been update after update recently, where will it end?...anyway this is the first part of an exploration into Fran's history (or my take on it).

P.S: Though I have been trying to do a better job of responding directly to each of your individual reviews, I would like to thank everyone for their continual interest in, and feedback to, this story.


'Gods damn it, would you look at this.'

Balthier muttered ill-spiritedly mostly to himself as he poked at the mass of frayed, fluid leaking, wires and circuitry tangled in a nest inside the steering console relay of the Strahl.

'The electrics and command relays have been almost completely eroded by Mist.' He growled using his specialised tools to poke inside the thicket of wires and tap irritably at the scorched and burned circuit boards and fused control nodes.

'I'm going to have to strip the old girl down to her bare boards and re-wire the entire steering and navigation arrays.'

Balthier continued in his complaining as he pushed himself out from underneath the control console (where he had been wedged, lying flat on his back, between the pilot's and navigator's chairs) and reached for a rag to wipe the oil, grease and Mist residue fluid from his hands.

Fran, sitting neatly in one of the passenger seats with one long leg crossed over the over, remained impassive. 'We have the necessary equipment for this maintenance?'

'Hmm,' Balthier looked up at her from his distracted thoughts, 'Oh, yes. The Strahl blows her fuse fairly regularly, it's just an annoyance.'

In truth under ordinary circumstances Balthier would not mind too terribly greatly, his love for his ship outweighing the inconvenience (and yes, expense) of maintaining an antique in flight worthy shape.

It was also true that the sort of detailed, complex, fine-tuning needed was the sort of (if not the only) maintenance he was actually prepared to soil his cuffs in doing himself.

Fran cocked her head to the side, 'Can I be of assistance?'

Fran was of course an exemplary mechanical engineer, but her expertise lay in engines and heavy machinery, while his lay in wiring and small components. It was typical of their partnership that like so many other aspects of their duality their different strengths and corresponding weaknesses created a perfect symbiosis.

In this instance, however, Fran's long clawed hands made it difficult for her to do the fine, fiddly work needed to repair the steering controls and Nono, who was small enough to reach the pokier nooks and crannies inside the control console, was unfortunately elsewhere overseeing the funerals of a handful of heroic Moogles.

Balthier smiled with genuine warmth, 'You are always of assistance, Fran.' He murmured honestly. He then briskly shook himself and focussed on the business at hand.

'Would you be so kind as to disengage the power couplings to the cockpit from the engine room? I would rather not risk electrocuting myself.'

Without a word Fran rose from her chair and left the cockpit. Balthier watched her go with open admiration, knowing that for all the heightened intensity of her senses, Fran did not, thankfully, have eyes in the back of her head.

Once he was sure she had gone Balthier let out a pent up sigh from the depths of his lungs, not relief and not regret, it was more an exhalation of exhaustion.

Spreading the fingers of each hand, which hovered over his drawn up knees as he sat on the cold floor of the Strahl's cockpit, Balthier noted the twitching tremor that raced through his hands and into the pinkish, swollen and slightly discolored and grey joints of his fingers, with disgust.

Balthier had been feeling, if not outright unwell, then at the very least out-of-sorts for the last week.

Initially he had dismissed the muscle pains and disturbed stomach as merely the aftermath of over exertion from rescuing Fran (not to mention the excitements of involving her in a war torn scheme that saw her kidnapped in the first place – and saw him garner a collection of interesting bumps and bruises). However as he was usually a robust and swift healer and far too proud to give in to common ailments, it was surprising that the strange malady afflicting him persisted days after those events had faded into recent memory.

Still it would take more than an upset stomach and some minor swelling and discoloration of the extremities to force him to admit to being merely mortal and thus afflicted by mortal ailments.

So far he felt he had done a relatively thorough job of hiding his weakness and discomfiture from Fran, even to the point of managing to avoid eating altogether that much in her presence (which was a feat in itself as Fran tended to view his lack of very great appetite with distain - the only times she ever appeared even remotely 'motherly' toward him was when she chided him to eat), still he did not suppose he would be able to do so for much longer.

Rising to his feet, with the intention of checking some of the subsidiary wiring in the cabin walls (the lighting system had been on the blink and he suspected the Mist damage had spread to non-essential systems as well), Balthier was suddenly afflicted by a wave of nauseating dizziness and loss of vision. He tottered on his feet and groped blindly for support.

His questing hand caught hold of something warm, silky soft and smooth with long, sharp nails. Fran's hand curled around his and drew him towards one of the passenger seats.

'This weakness cannot go on. The rhythms of your body are out of balance. You are ill.'

Balthier sighed in resignation as he cupped his head in his hands and blinked away the lingering cloud of black and white spots obscuring his vision. 'It is just a little light-headedness Fran; no doubt I have simply neglected to eat a balanced diet, hmm?'

He looked up at her with a weak attempt at his usual blasé smirk. Fran remained less than amused. She quirked an eyebrow as she stood before him, hip-cocked and arms folded across her chest.

'Think you I do not know, Balthier? What little you eat your body then purges violently; your stomach rebelling against its own hunger. Did you think to hide the evidence of your own illness from me, or perhaps yourself?'

A tiny tickle of annoyance whispered over him as he conceded that yes, it had been foolish to assume Fran would not be able to intuit even the slightest change in his demeanour, but really did she have to be quite so blunt about it?

'Clearly either deception was set to fail from the outset.' He muttered darkly, 'I am prepared to concede I may have contracted some manner of mild gastric malady; a trifling thing really.'

Fran shook her head with a soft 'tut' of disapproval, a strangely overt sign of annoyance from her. She crouched down in front of him and placed her long, elegant palm across his forehead, surprising him with the candour of her touch.

'I scent it, Balthier. There is a pall of Mist in the very air, blown east from Nabudis, that taints each rain fall and sickens the fish in the rivers and the livestock in the fields. This taint of Mist from your skin does rise as well.'

Her frank gaze was too much for Balthier.

She had never once asked him of Nabudis, or Nalbina, or of Hamish and his merry band of rebels, and he, in gratitude, had not spoken to her of her wild, crazed behaviour in the Highwaste prior to her capture.

Instead they had loitered quietly in Balfonheim and closed their ears to the wild stories and conjecture that filled the Whitecap tavern and the Gallerina.

They had paid no mind to the stories of the Mist sickness that had taken the lives of many of the survivors of Nabudis and the poison rain that had cascaded from the skies in the surrounding areas as a result of the huge Mist funnel that had risen from Nabradia plains on that terrible night.

'I am not poisoned Fran, merely a little under the weather.'

Balthier gritted out through his teeth, unwilling to consider just how much of that noxious vapour and Mist he had absorbed into his lungs during his ill-fated visit to the fallen Nabudis.

Wouldn't Bethesda be delighted should it prove he too had been poisoned by the Empire's newest weapon of annihilation?

Something flickered in Fran's strange and unerring almond shaped eyes; he could not read the emotion, if that was what it was, that passed beneath her serene façade.

'I see it, Balthier, your eyes are dark. They bleed. Through your eyes your soul is weeping. You speak more eloquently with each averted glance than with any words. In your eyes I see Nabudis fall.'

Balthier flinched. He tried to control the impulse but could not. He shied away from her like a frightened child afraid she would strike at him. In many ways her words bit deeper than any physical injury.

Words swelled up in an impossible tide on the tip of his tongue, a deluge of confusion threatening to drown them both should he loose that tide. Instead he pursed his lips and shook his head.

Fran reached out a hand to brush her knuckles down his cheek. 'You will not speak?'

For a moment the simple intimacy of her touch, the sublime gentleness (enlivened by the slightest spark of indulgent humour which quickened his soul) threatened to undo his resolve to keep those horrors he had witnessed locked away inside him.

Almost unconsciously he brushed his face against her palm, knowing that this moment's physicality between them (as chaste as it was) would be fleeting and so he wanted to garner as much from it as he could, while he could.

'Is it not the Hume way to speak on ones fears; does that not aid your healing from such soul deep wounds?' she sounded both curious and perturbed by Balthier's solemn silence.

'I haven't any answers Fran, so what good is conversation? Everything I thought I knew of war and empire was proved wrong that night. I knew my homeland was governed by avarice and superior conceit, but I had not known…I did not know…..had not fathomed that such…….evil…..truly existed until I saw Nabudis fall.'

Abruptly he stopped the stream of babble falling from his lips, jerking back from her touch as he realised that, foolishly, selfishly, he had let his tongue run away with him.

He had vowed to himself not to speak of Nabudis ever, and never to Fran.

A wave of uncomfortably hot chills chased up his spine and throbbed in his finger jolts, which had swollen enough that he had removed his rings before they began to pinch intolerably. More irritated with this resurgence in his own frailty than pained by it, Balthier turned his hot, angry gaze away from Fran.

He did not want Fran to see him like this. He did not want her to see him sick, and scared, and confused. He did not want her to find him to be merely as foolish, ignorant and ridiculous as the great mass of Hume-kind that she had never bothered to know.

If Fran was to discover that he was no different (perhaps even that he was worse) than any other Hume she might chose to leave him. The thought of that alone was enough to set his teeth to chattering, even as he locked his jaw against it.

'You have no answers?' Fran queried still perched, seemingly comfortable, in a crouch before his chair.

As he looked up at her, almost involuntarily, he caught the faintest hint of a smile resting in her eyes and on her lips. 'Do you only seek conversation when you have all the answers, Balthier?'

He tried to wriggle free of her calm, steady regard, as he realised that her jest hit surprisingly close to the mark.

'That is not what I meant Fran.' He muttered mulishly, hunching his shoulders against the feverish burn of shivers that chased up his torso and raced down his arms.

He had always been self-assured (arrogant many claimed) but until now he had always assumed that assurance was justified, that he had in fact possessed most, if not all, of the answers.

Now he was not sure he even knew the questions, let alone the answers.

Fran was watching him quietly, patiently, and he had the feeling that she knew something of the turmoil inside him, that she could hear every question he was afraid to voice.

The thought terrified him, but deep down, he found he wished it was true. He wished that she could give him the answers, that in her long years of wandering she had discovered the root of, and the cure to, the evil in men's heart.

'Why Fran?' he whispered unable to stay quiet. 'Why do you not return to your Wood? To where your fellow Viera reside? How can you stand to associate with Humes when you know what we do?'

He regretted the words in an instant and looked up at her in shocked horror at his own thoughtless stupidity.

He was mortified that he had not only questioned her on the past he swore he did not care about, but that he had suggested that she might have justification to leave him and go where he could not follow.

To his utter astonishment Fran's beautiful, still face underwent an instantaneous transformation right before his eyes.

She smiled.

Not a tiny quiver of her lips, not a twinkle in the eye and twitch of one long, elegant ear, but a true smile, a strangely predatory flash of white teeth against her dusky cinnamon skin.

'I had pondered that you may never find bravery enough to ask such of me, Balthier.'

In the blinking of an eyelash Fran had returned to her familiar placidity but he knew that he had seen the spirit within flash free for just a moment, and he now watched her rise to her feet with silent amazement.

'There will be no repairs done today.' Fran stated with calm recitation of fact and implicit command. 'You are ill Balthier; it is time for you to retire to your bed.'

Woozily Balthier frowned at her, 'Are you evading the question?' he found he was not sure, blind-sided by that shocking grin and by his own fuzzy-headed misery.

Fran cocked her head to the side and looked at him with a strangely penetrating regard.

'Do you truly seek an answer?'

Ordinarily Fran's gaze was cool and passive, seeing all but actively pursuing none of the secrets she saw revealed in the eyes of men, yet now she looked on him as if she would hunt down an honest answer.

It was, to say the very least, as disconcerting as her sudden grin had been exhilarating.

Feeling increasingly unwell, partly due to his own malady, but mostly due to the tumultuous twists and turns their conversation had taken thus far, Balthier rose carefully, joints hot and aching, to his feet.

'To be quite frank, Fran, I no longer know. How can I have answers when the bloody questions elude me?'

Fran's gaze softened and strange warmth suffused her face, something far greater and rarer even than her smile.

'That is good. I will tell you now. I will speak of Eruyt, for you are ready to listen now.'

Balthier wondered, confusedly, how he had inadvertently stumbled upon the means to reach the very heart of her being, the key to her companionship he had sought all along, and cursed himself to realise that he still did not know what he had done, or said, that had affected such a change in her.

He blinked at her dumbly, 'Why now?'

The prospect that he might have simply asked Fran honestly at any time in their association if she sought to leave him and received an honest answer left him quietly shaken to his core.

He had always assumed that Fran was as he was, jealous and protective of her past and her secrets. Now he began to suspect that he had been very wrong in this assumption.

He had been wrong on so many things lately.

Fran nodded her head and Balthier was almost convinced that she was agreeing with his silent, internal monologue, the realisations that came thick and fast as he came to the conclusion that, in truth, he did not know as much as he thought he did.

'The song of the wind in the trees may be loud and strong, but if there is no will or means to listen to new truths and distant voices, the wind's song goes unheeded. Why for would I tell you what you believed you did not wish to know?'

There was no reproach in her tone but Balthier still felt a sting of shame as he moved slowly and cautiously, his body itching with throbbing aches and pains that seemed to have taken his concession of ill health as a mandate to make him suffer fully, towards the Strahl's outer cabin.

'I thought I was being gallant, Fran. I was trying to demonstrate that I accepted you as you are now and was not swayed by what you once were.' He sighed reproachfully, 'I was trying to be selflessly open-minded.'

'To ask is not selfish; to assume in silence is.'

Balthier turned back to her sharply (regretting the motion when his head reeled), he frowned darkly. 'Clearly I have much to learn about Hume – Viera etiquette.'

The slightest twitch of her ears indicated her amusement, 'Indeed. You may yet learn, however.'

With Fran following him with the silent grace of a falling leaf, Balthier made his way to his tiny cabin and flopped (somewhat gratefully) onto his bed.

Fran surprised him for the umpteenth time that morning by settling her long, lithe body on the counterpane beside him (the bed was narrow and allowed for no room between the lines of their bodies, her hip brushed against him and his whole being tingled with the contact – or possibly it was merely his rising fever, but Balthier preferred his interpretation).

Sitting up with her back against the wall, while Balthier lay his aching head on the mound of pillows, Fran set her gaze upon the empty vista of her memory, hands still and resting in her lap.

Eventually, after a moment's quietude wherein Balthier fidgeted to make himself comfortable and Fran gathered her thoughts, she turned her head towards him and raised an inquiring eyebrow, 'You are lying comfortably?'

Despite himself, as he looked up at her, Balthier felt his lips quiver in dry amusement. 'Oh yes, quite comfortable. It has been an age since I have enjoyed a bedtime story.'

Fran refrained from comment as she once again looked away from him. Her eyes calm and her expression peaceful.

Balthier marvelled at how easy it appeared to be for Fran to peel back the layers of time and distance and reveal herself to him. Vaguely he doubted that he would ever have the strength to be so steady in retelling his past (not that he intended to tell anyone about his true origins save Fran, and she already knew the bare bones of the whole sordid story).

'Once,' Fran began in her cool, exotic tones, 'I was Viera and of the Wood.'

Watching her closely Balthier shifted onto his side. He was deeply curious about her tale (he had made some educated guesses regarding how long she had been exiled from her people and which Viera village she hailed from) yet the sheer proximity of her exquisite body to his was proving distracting.

'Know you of Eruyt, Balthier?'

Wrenching his gaze from the gorgeous length of her legs laid out across his bed, the silky, lacquered sheen of the skin of her thighs seeming to glow in his fuzzy vision, Balthier smirked to cover his momentary embarrassment at being caught staring.

'No. I don't believe I'm familiar with the name. Am I to assume that this – Eruyt –' he stumbled on the unfamiliar pronunciation, 'is the place of your birth, Fran?'

Fran nodded, 'It is situated along the Path of Verdant Praise within the jungle of Golmore. I and my sisters were born of the Wood of Golmore.'

Balthier raised his eyebrows sharply, 'Sisters?' he had not considered that Fran might have siblings – the idea of his beautiful, unique Fran coming from an extended family was very peculiar to him.

Somehow, strangely, the prospect almost seemed to diminish her and he found himself oddly unwilling to hear of her family. Of course this may simply be residue bitterness over his own filial situation.

Fran nodded once more, a troubled frown alighting briefly upon her countenance. 'Jote and Myrn; it has been near fifty summers and winters past since I saw my sisters last.'

Balthier controlled his reaction instantly and so when Fran cast her keen gaze on him he gave her nothing but a look of mild and innocent interest. He thought he detected the slightest hint of relief in her countenance at his very lack of reaction to this revelation.

Fifty years, hmm? Well, well, fancy that.

Balthier considered this and briefly curiosity flared in him regarding Fran's true age, but then he let the matter drop.

It mattered not to him if she was fifty or seventy or seven hundred. Age was merely a number in any respect. Her wealth of accumulated experience simply formed a rich seam of knowledge he could exploit to make up for his own youthful ignorance.

'……….warder of the Wood, it was my task to mind the paths and guard the Jungle's secrets from those who would misuse the Wood and trespass upon the Green Way.'

Balthier came back to himself to realise he had drifted away from the melodious rise and fall of Fran's unfolding tale. He raised his hand (skin throbbing and pulsing with aching heat) to his forehead and grimaced against the clammy moisture that beaded on his brow.

Almost unconsciously, feeling exquisitely miserable, hearing fading in waves of sound and eyes burning in the dim light, Balthier shifted imperceptibly closer to Fran, though, in truth, no distance remained between them.

He sought his own comfort but, strangely and entirely inadvertently, his presence brought comfort to Fran as well.

'In the Wood time has little meaning. Viera measure the passing of the season through the ebb and flow of new life along the Green Way. That which grows blossoms, blooms and decays only for new growth to rise anew after the frost.'

The tip of Balthier's nose (too long and slight up-turned, he had always been a little displeased with his profile because of that same nose) brushed against Fran's hip. He sighed and his breath stroked down her thigh. The world she recreated with her words held little appeal to him. A prison of foliage was a prison all the same.

Thankfully he was not quite feverish enough to admit this out loud.

'War and peace, empires and principalities, are to Viera no more than a phantom whisper that sometimes blows through the jungle boughs, and is thusly disregarded.'

Fran paused and in her silence Balthier suspected much went unspoken. In every word she had thusly spoken he had heard the distant ghostly echo of grief for the world she had left behind.

This sorrow, at least, he could understand, and for that reason he made no acknowledgement of its echo in her tale. There could be no commiseration for a bereavement so personal and enduring and one that had been wrought through choice.

'I remember not what year in the Hume calendar it was, nor quite remember now which war did scatter the Hume man and his party to the paths of Golmore. I fear it matters not.'

'Hume man?' Woozily Balthier dragged his attention to the tale; it appeared to be gaining momentum and interest.

Balthier had long suspected (and in fact Fran had hinted as much) that he was not the first Hume she had taken up with, but he had never quite found the courage to ask after his predecessors in anything other than the most ribald jests that were easily deferred and ignored by her.

Fran nodded, 'I know not what his name was. To Viera that man and the Hume women and children he sought to guide safely through Golmore were no more than trespassers. As warder of the Wood I did confront the man as he tried to navigate our sacred paths.'

It was proving a struggle to keep his eyes open and to his great discomfort Balthier could feel his attention sliding away into fever dreams.

Thus it was not lechery but an attempt to remain with Fran as her past unfolded that led him to rest his swollen hand (already blemished with the dark spots of encroaching Mist poisoning that Fran recognised and Balthier did not) on her knee.

'I take it the confrontation did not go as planned?' Balthier struggled with a swollen tongue to show that he remained as attentive and interested in her story as he could be, under the unfortunate circumstances.

Fran, picking up his hand and studying it, both palm and back, to check that his Mist dosing was not more severe than she suspected, sighed audibly.

'As Viera I warned the Hume and his companions of their danger and that he would receive no shelter, nor welcome, within Golmore; no Hume alone could find the means to enter Eruyt and no true Viera would aid him.'

'The Hume did not listen, I wager?' Balthier forced open heavy and slightly swollen eyelids to look up at her curiously.

Fran shook her head, 'The Humes fled from war. Those accompanying the Hume man had lost all they had ever known or loved. In their desperation, their desolation, they had come to believe that salvation resided beyond Golmore's canopy. They would not be deterred.'

Balthier nodded his face close enough to Fran's leg that his cheek brushed her skin, a quick and pleasant friction. 'Unsurprising; were they headed for the east or the west of Golmore?'

Fran's surprise was noticeable in the slight tension that went through her body at his question. 'You know of Golmore, Balthier?'

He chuckled, 'It is difficult for a student of geography not to know something of Golmore Fran; it is the largest jungle in the southern hemisphere. I was merely curious what skirmish could have displaced these persons you speak of.'

Fran hesitated a moment before answering, 'They sought passage north-west through Golmore and entered from the east.'

Balthier could feel a slight, ironic smirk brush his lips, 'So they were mostly likely Archadian. Perhaps escaping the Deering Boar war, the timing seems sound, if memory serves.'

'I know not. As Viera it was not my place to know, nor care.'

'I cannot imagine you so devoid of curiosity Fran.' Balthier admitted, even as his words slurred and he began to shiver violently.

'Viera have no need of curiosity; all is known in the Wood. The Green Way has many winding paths but does not deviate nor change direction.'

'It sounds highly restrictive and not a little dull.' Balthier began to fade into fever dream.

Thus he did not see Fran's bittersweet smile and barely felt her long claw tips stroke through his short hair in response.

'Yes,' she murmured on a breath, 'you are not the first Hume to call it such. Yet the Wood was mother to me and the Green Way my home.'

'Then why leave?' he whispered on the brink of sleep.

Yet Balthier still forced his eyes open to catch a faint glimpse of the genuine anguish that twisted like a knife within her scarlet eyes.

'You speak of seeking answers, Balthier, but it is not answers that need be sought. For answers offer no absolution. The Wood whispered to me that the Hume trespassers should be left to fall to the fiends of Golmore. That they be granted neither aid nor shelter, though some be barely more than babes and others frail with age.'

Fran shook her head sharply her expression lit with rare animation and infused with a dark anguish that had lurked within her for longer than Balthier had drawn breath.

'The Wood spoke and Fran the Viera did listen.'

Balthier said nothing, though he suspected what she would say next. He saw a quiet, aching regret and futile anger banked behind her crimson gaze and recognised his own anger and confusion, regards the fall of Nabudis, in that reflected fire.

Responding to her almost imperceptible distress Balthier reached out his hand that rested in her lap and clasped her cool fingers in his swollen, stiff jointed hand.

When Fran spoke again her voice was torn with an almost unspeakable sorrow; too remote for grief, too deep to be merely ancient regret.

'There was evil in the Wood. Evil whispering along the Green Way and it did not come from the Humes.'

Fran closed her eyes and squeezed Balthier's hand in turn.

'There was evil in the Wood and its name was Fran.'


A/N: By and by, I seem to like to make Balthier suffer, don't I? Now I've given the poor sod a mild case of poisoning, does my sadism know no ends? ;)