If all a soul can do is bleed, I'd sooner be without.

'What in the name of the gods is going on here?'

Ashe demanded and her eyes rooted, unwavering, to Balthier as, head pounding with a dull incessant beat and Vaan squirming against his arm lock, the pirate, who had found himself in the centre of a royal farce, had a moment of total mental inadequacy.

That's what I would like to know.

Deliberately not looking at Penelo (for looking on the girl seemed to be detrimental to his state of being, if this whole affair was any indication) Balthier gave Vaan's arm a quick, painful, wrench for good measure and then released the youth before turning to Ashe with what he hoped was a suave and confident half-smile (but which he feared, considering his mood, his aching head, and current predicament, was likely to be something of a grimace).

'Ah, Princess, I was just using Vaan as a handy demonstration tool.'

'Demonstration tool?' Ashe's voice was cold enough to snap steel and freeze the blood in his veins, 'What were you demonstrating; how to break someone's arm in the most unpleasant manner while a guest in someone else's house?'

Unlike certain people Ashe had no qualms in speaking her mind and did not feel the need to apologize for having the social graces of a hungry Couerl. Balthier could feel his headache progressing throughout the lobes of his brain with every interminable second. Being struck straight to the grey matter by numerous bolts of Thundaga would be preferable to this.

Still he would grin and forebear it, 'Not quite, Ashe, but surprisingly close. I was merely demonstrating to young Penelo how to master an arm lock hold that does not require one to have greater physical strength than one's opponent.'

Ashe was no fool, after giving him a long look, she turned to Vaan who was rubbing at his arm in surly and disagreeable temper, 'Vaan is this true? Were you merely 'demonstrating' defensive manoeuvres for Penelo's benefit?'

Vaan, who had absolutely no common sense whatsoever ignored Ashe and looked hotly up at Balthier, 'I'll show you defensive manoeuvres...'

He did not get to finish whatever facile insult he was intending for at that moment Penelo leapt forward and slammed her friend's head into the wall (far harder than Balthier had done) before grabbing his arm and wrenching it behind his back painfully.

'Like this Balthier?' she asked him in chipper voice, those misleadingly sweet eyes of hers over-brimming with entirely feigned innocence.

If it wasn't for the fact that this entire mess was of her doing Balthier might have been quite exceedingly impressed by both her quick thinking and her ruthless treatment of her friend.

As it was he merely found himself thoroughly irritated with the whole blasted affair, 'Marvellously done, you are a swift learner.'

Ashe was watching all this with narrowed, disturbingly thoughtful eyes. Almost absently she raised her thumb and forefinger to her bottom lip and pulled on it in a fashion that should have looked childish and ridiculous but instead was oddly endearing, 'Where have you been Balthier? We have missed you.'

Oh, and wasn't that a barbed, barbed, question? Balthier did not need to guess that her highness was using the royal 'we' in this instance and that despite the deceptively gentle softness of her words she was not voicing concern over his absence.

When she said 'We have missed you,' it translated to mean how dare you leave me when I need your airship, your gun, and possibly your life to liberate my country, which I was foolish enough to lose in the first place...oh yes, Balthier almost smiled to himself, his life was a bed of roses right now.

On the one hand he was monstrously hung-over (and why was that all the best pleasures in life had nasty side-effects?) on the other he was now guilty of patricide, which had proved to be a lot more harrowing than he had initially surmised.

To top it all off he now had oddly passive-aggressive Rabanastre orphans trying to kiss him and a dangerously possessive Dalmascan monarch (who he was worryingly attracted to) who viewed him as a useful tool and would dearly like to sink her claws into him so deep they would meet in the middle.

Sometimes Balthier truly thought that life would be infinitely better if he simply packed Fran, Nono, and himself into the Strahl and flew off the edge of the map; there would be fewer people there to thoroughly foul up his life.

He hated bloody people with their demands and their questions and their constant expectations...yes, perhaps after this mess with Bahamut was over with, he should simply pack-in the pirate life and become a reclusive hermit somewhere...Fran probably wouldn't mind so much, as long as there was a wood she could attempt to commune with.

Hmmm, there was a distinct possibility that a trifle more of that Madhu remained in his bloodstream and his thoughts than he had first suspected. Sadly it was not enough to allow him to see the funny side of this utterly farcical state of affairs.

All he had wanted to do was paint a bloody picture; how it had all gone so wrong was simply beyond him.

Balthier was rudely interrupted from his somewhat deranged consideration of how long it would take to grow a suitably hermit-like beard by Ashe's fingers clicking in his face, 'Good gods man, how drunk are you?

He sighed, 'I'm not; therein lies the tragedy.'

Ashe regarded him quizzically (which simply meant that she re-arranged her facial features from angry scowl to puzzled scowl via subtle variations in the lifting of her left brow), 'I have been trying to speak with you, have you not heard a word I've said?'

Balthier, who did not like to be caught out when obviously lacking in mental acuity, began to lose what little stock of patience had survived recent events, 'Apparently not, Princess, or I dare say I would have made some effort to answer you.'

He was aware in the periphery of his beleaguered senses that Penelo had released Vaan only to drag him further down the corridor, wherein she was now whispering to him in fierce aside as the youth in question continued to glare daggers into Balthier's back.

Where the bloody hell was Fran when he needed her?

'You are returned I take it?'

The answer to his desperate mental summons sauntered down the hall all gently swaying hair and impossibly elegant legs.

Were it not for the fact that his act of nonchalant control of the situation would have been ruined by so doing, he would have laughed for sheer relief as Fran interjected herself into this little tableau of awkwardness.

With a quick flick of enigmatic eyes and twitch of her ears Fran assessed the situation, gave him a droll look, and moved protectively to his side forcing Ashe (who seemed to be just slightly intimidated by Fran) to step back.

'You do not appear to be in poor health; no ill came to you while you were away from here?'

Fran, who happened to have helped him climb in the second floor window of their shared room earlier today and then left him to sleep off his drunkenness while convincing the rest of the party he was nowhere about, gave him a look that clearly said that she did not know what had happened but she was assigning all blame upon him regardless.

'Yes Fran, no ill came to me while I was gone.' It was all waiting for him when he came back.

One picture, that was all. A picture of a pretty girl in oils and acrylics, that was all I wanted and now no doubt Vaan wishes to murder me in my sleep and Penelo...the gods alone know what she intended from all this.

With Ashe forced into reluctant retreat and Penelo riding rough-shod over Vaan's spurned and aggrieved murderous intent, Balthier risked a quick sideways glance at the pigtailed blonde who had caused all this woe.

Balthier had had women abruptly kiss him before and usually been more than happy to reciprocate, but he had never been so completely thrown by it as now.

Primarily because, as blasé and disinterested as his feigned to be in previous intimate encounters with other young ladies, he had in fact been actively seducing them.

With Penelo he had no such designs (as he had told her more than once) and that she would go from almost, but not quite, insulting him to awkwardly, clumsily, throwing herself at him left Balthier utterly perplexed and, here was the rub, feeling as if he had somehow led the girl wrong.

Quite abruptly Balthier decided that he desperately, ravenously, needed a drink.

I am the house that grief built; haunted by those who have left me and departed where I can ne'er follow.

Penelo slammed the door of her room after shoving Vaan through it and shot the lock home, leaning against the solid wood and trying to catch her thoughts.

Vaan stood in the centre of the early evening moonlight painting her bedroom floor looking like a wounded Chocobo chick, 'How could you let him kiss you Pen?'

Gritting her teeth against the wave of embarrassment and guilt, Penelo breathed deeply and tried to marshal her patience, 'I didn't Vaan. Balthier did not kiss me...' she took another deep breath and said again, for the third time, what Vaan seemed incapable of grasping, 'I kissed him and as soon as I did so he pushed me away. Absolutely nothing happened.'

'But Pen,' Vaan, although his voice had broken some time again, could still hit grating highnotes when in full throated whine, 'Balthier was in your room. What was he doing here if he...I mean if you and...' Vaan trailed off reddening in the face and shuffling his feet as Penelo felt herself paling.

'How could you think that of me Vaan? That I would...that Balthier and I...'

'Well,' Vaan rallied looking up at her as the pale frosted moonlight, reflecting off the solid blanket of the ocean, and shining through her window, lit his hair and made the silvery strands glow, 'it's only natural, I mean with a man like Balthier, there's only one reason he'd be in a girl's room.'

Penelo felt the bottom drop out of her stomach at Vaan's words (which despite his anger, still accorded Balthier high accord, if only in being a preeminent cad). It wasn't that the allegation was so far-fetched or that in any other circumstances, or with any other girl, she wouldn't have suspected the same. It was that Vaan (who knew what life in Rabanastre had been like) would think she would ever do such a thing with any man.

'Vaan please...I couldn't...I...you know Vaan, you know. How could you think...'

'Then why did you kiss him?'

One question without a simple answer: why had she kissed him?

Was it simply because she knew he did not want her?

Penelo loved Vaan truly and completely, even though sometimes she wanted to bash his head in with a blunt instrument for being an oblivious fool on occasion, but even with Vaan, she could never imagine surrendering herself to him in anything...intimate...even the thought of it (and even knowing he would never, ever hurt her) made her feel cold and sick.

She could almost feel herself growing pale and cold and distant as the little hole of forbidden pain inside her opened up.

'Pen? Penny? Oh, no Penelo...I'm sorry don't, don't think about...Pen?'

The memory of a man's hands on her bare skin, a man's body bearing down on her, pushing her down to the hard, cold ground, riding her down like an unbroken Chocobo, his breath in her face hot as the furnaces of the underworld, strong fingers curled around her forearms, nails digging into her flesh and big, wet teeth so close to her own mouth...

Without knowing it she had begun to shake and the vibrations of her distress reverberated through the wooden door as her legs gave way and she crumpled, in tears, onto the floor.

Vaan was there almost before she hit and his arms encircled her, 'Gods Pen, I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking. I just saw you and Balthier and he had his hands on you and I know how you feel about that and I,' Vaan swallowed as Penelo tried to stifle sobs and wiped her nose on his shoulder just as she had a thousand times before, 'I know Vaan, it's alright.'

She forgave him, just as she had a thousand times before for all manner of little and not so little mistakes, 'He wanted to paint my portrait. That's why Balthier came to my room.'

Vaan pulled back so he could look her in the eyes, 'Huh?'

Penelo withdrew and pulled herself together, swallowing back the dark wave of old horror and closing her heart around it, her soul re-absorbing the wound and tucking the pain and the fear where it could no longer paralyse her every move and haunt her every thought.

She pointed desolately at the easel, hidden in the corner of her frost and moon drenched room, 'See?'

Vaan ambled over to the easel and roughly pulled off the sack cloth. For a moment he just peered at the faint pencil outlines and light shading of drying paint that Balthier had applied.

'Oh,' was all he said, and curious, Penelo stood to see for herself.

'Oh,' Penelo unintentionally echoed Vaan.

It was difficult to see in the wavering shadows of the ocean reflected on the walls of her room and the misty light of the moon, but slowly, tantalisingly slowly, the details of the sketch that formed the foundations of a painting revealed themselves.

A girl, all curled in on herself, upon a window seat with the sea and the brilliant sunset sky as her backdrop, gazed with odd boldness back out at them from the canvas. Despite the fact that this girl was no more than a ghost in pencil lead, there was something so vital and so engaging about her that she held the eye with a near vicelike intensity.

Penelo, tears drying on her face, found herself smiling. She almost didn't recognise the perfectly captured features of her own face, and yet at the same time she felt that the girl in the portrait might, just might, be Penelo. Or maybe just who Penelo wanted to be?

Quite abruptly Vaan turned on his heel and walked across the room towards the door, wrenching Penelo's gaze from the picture, 'Vaan? What is it, where are you going?'

Fright strangled her as she feared the picture, or the fact that Balthier had made it, had offended him. The last thing in all Ivalice she would ever want was to hurt Vaan.

With the door half opened Vaan turned back to her with an oddly grim expression on his face. The moonlight caressed his round, boyish features and suggested the promise of strength he might have in adulthood, 'I'm going to find Balthier.'

Was all he said and she had but rarely heard him sound so serious.

'Why?' she croaked in a tiny voice.

'Because he needs to finish what he started; he needs to make the girl in the picture real again.'

'Vaan?'

Penelo stared at him uncomprehending. Vaan blinked his eyes a couple of times and she thought that, just maybe, a gleam of moisture from his eyes caught the moonlight like quicksilver before he blinked it away.

'That's you, Pen,' Vaan told her, his voice oddly hoarse as he pointed to the uncovered easel behind her back, 'you like you were before the war. If Balthier can bring that you back then I'm going to make sure he does it, whether he wants to or not.'

Before Penelo could so much as formulate a reply Vaan was gone and moving with such swift purpose that she could not even here his feet clomping on the boards outside.

For a handful of seconds, as Penelo fumbled for her nosegay and pressed it to her mouth taking a number of erratic shaking breaths, all that filled her mind was the hissing laughter of the ocean waves, just beyond her window.

It did not take long, however, for reality to catch up with her and Penelo blinked and jolted as she realised the ramifications of another run-in between Vaan and Balthier. Finally able to galvanise her mind and body into action Penelo clumsily lurched into movement.

'Vaan...wait!'

With one last, thoughtful, look at the unfinished portrait, Penelo ran from her room still calling after Vaan.

I am a dancer so watch me dance; I shall step a merry jig for you, ever at arm's length. I am dancer and never shall you snare me. I am a dancer and I dance alone.

The Whitecap was heaving, as it invariably was, with a mass of the less savoury aspects of Ivalice society (and he used the term loosely).

Sitting at his usual table (the previous occupants taking one look at his face and deciding to call it an early night) with Fran beside him Balthier took a healthy swig from his ale tankard, having just completed regaling Fran of his innocuous interactions with Penelo, which had had such baffling results.

Fran sat back in her chair and tapped her long fingers upon the metal of her own (untouched) tankard, 'So she has caught your eye, has she?'

Balthier sighed, 'I know that you do not mean that in an amorous way, so will answer honestly, yes she has.'

'A pretty girl, she is.'

Fran gave her words subtle inflection, not quite a question but a request for further clarification, nevertheless. Fran was one of the few people who knew what his 'art', for lack of a better term, meant to him, and what a rarity it was for anyone to catch his eye, and his muse, as Penelo had.

'Ivalice is filled with pretty girls, and those who would be pretty, that is not the reason I wanted to paint her.'

Fran merely nodded, she did not truly need him to explain it to her, for she knew him far better than he knew himself (Balthier was man enough to admit as much, but only in the privacy of his thoughts), 'Much wrong has been done her, she carries more scars of the soul than one of her years should.'

He nodded. He knew Fran held special affection for the girl, 'And yet she is still, fundamentally, almost intrinsically, innocent.'

Balthier mused looking down into the dregs of his tankard, 'I swear to you Fran, on whatever oath you would chose me to honour, that the thought of seducing Penelo never once crossed my mind. She is barely more than a child.'

Fran almost smiled at this, 'To mine eyes the same could be said of you. Scant six years separate your birth from hers.'

Balthier gave her a withering look, 'Fran I have precious little honour and integrity left me, allow me the notion that I have the moral decency not to seduce the seventeen year old sweetheart of my potential apprentice, if you please.'

His partner in all things save the carnal quirked an eyebrow, 'So you have considered bedding her?'

Balthier finished the last of his pint and briefly considered just how useless he might be in the morning if he took another – but then decided her royal Highness Dalmasca would flay him alive if he appeared hung-over in her presence once more and decided he didn't need the drink after all.

'No,' he answered the blunt question with blunt honesty, 'I won't deny she is pretty but I am not such a blind fool that I cannot see that Penelo is deathly afraid of men. Nor am I quite bastard enough that I would ever do anything to deliberately upset the girl.'

'Think you not that what you did, rendering her physical essence in pen and ink, was harmful to her?'

He looked up at Fran sharply in response to that deliberately mild question that nevertheless hinted at a subliminal reproach. Something like chagrin and almost alarm hit his system like a jolt of powerful spirits.

'Bugger all,' he swore finally seeing Penelo's odd, alternatively subservient and hostile, reaction to him in new light, 'Damn all but I did not see it in such a way.'

Fran simply nodded once more, 'See you only what the artist's eye will see. Only what you can render understandable to your mind's eye through your pens and paper,' she cocked her head and regarded him distantly with ancient, alien eyes, 'You do not see the person, only the image. Ever it is with you.'

Balthier sighed, 'I would argue that my intentions were benign and I made no attempts to do anything but engage the shy child in a little banter, but the point is mute. I forgot that I was dealing with a girl who is not used to such.'

Paradoxically, now that she had made her partner see his fault in this matter and recognise that his actions, however well meant, had had unforeseen consequence, Fran sort to raise his spirits.

'That you viewed the girl as worthy of such verbal jousts as you call conversation is credit to your genuine affection for Penelo as a hume and person. Do not shun her now simply because she is young and misunderstood your intent.'

Balthier felt his brows stitch together, 'First you tell me, without actually telling me, that I have harmed the girl by inadvertently playing with her emotions, and now you tell me to continue to do so?'

'I say no such thing,' Fran rebuffed him, 'You fear to form connection with others of your kind Balthier. You and she are not so terribly different. You would control those you fear might ensnare, and then betray you, and she would withdraw and hide her lights for fear of abuse. Not so very different at all.'

He knew better than to argue with Fran, no matter what the subject, even when it was a matter of his own self, Fran had a way of winning any argument, or more accurately, making it so he ended up proving her point for her, through no design of his own.

'I do not control people and most certainly fear no mere hume,' he muttered churlishly addressing his empty tankard.

Someone else had said very similar to him, that he controlled people, playing games with them designed to keep everyone at arm's length, but who was it?

He was still considering that very point when he looked up just in time to see tow-haired Vaan striding purposefully toward him, or at least trying to; the youth was somewhat waylaid by the Whitecap crowds and Penelo, who was dragging on his arm like a Hume-anchor trying to further impede his progress.

Balthier swallowed back a number of choice epithets as this night simply went from bad to worse, 'Fran, would you be so kind as to fetch me another beer? I have a feeling I shall need one presently.'

Fran's ears twitched as she espied Vaan also and then, without a word, she rose and moved towards the bar.

Balthier sat back in his chair and affected his habitual pose of studied nonchalance awaiting the inevitable as Vaan finally approached the table with a harried Penelo still trying to persuade him to turn back and leave well enough alone.

'Balthier!'

Despite the almost wall to wall din filling the packed Whitecap to its rafters, Vaan's over-loud, overly confident, and trying too hard to be commanding, voice, still rose above the muted roar of the gamblers, reprobates, mark hunters and working girls who called the Whitecap their second home.

Internalising a sigh Balthier contrived to smirk at Vaan with his best impersonation of someone who isn't wishing for a sudden coronary to save him from this latest embarrassment, 'Vaan and Penelo, what brings you out so late?'

Momentarily distracted by the hale and hearty greeting Vaan deflated slightly while Penelo, eyes too wide and showing too much white, like a frightened Dreamhare, simply blinked at him in surprise and dawning suspicion.

'I wanted to talk to you,' Vaan persisted still clinging to his, rather awkward, but commendable attempt to look grim and commanding.

Balthier held onto his smirk by a force of will as his eyes flicked to Penelo who, much as he, looked like she would rather go a few rounds alone against Vayne Solidor and the entire remaining judiciary of the Empire than have a 'talk' about anything at all that involved he, Vaan, and Penelo herself.

Still, Balthier was nothing if not a consummate actor, 'Oh, what about precisely?'

Vaan's jaw jutted out as he struck out his chest in a rather unfortunate semblance of an angry cluckatrice, 'About the painting. I want to talk about the painting.'

'Oh, that's what you wish to talk about?'

Balthier continued to smile inanely as Penelo refused to look at him and the coronary he hoped for refused to strike him dead.

One picture, one pig-tailed girl, and all this trouble; Balthier found himself almost brought to laughter to consider that such a trivial thing could have such bloody inconvenient consequences.

Yet the worst of it all, Balthier conceded, as he watched Penelo close her eyes and resign herself, much as he had, to a very unpleasant conversation, was the realisation that, despite the trouble it had caused him, his fingers still almost itched with the desire to draw the girl.

Because she was still the prettiest, bravest, oddest little thing he had ever seen.