The fanfare has faded and the parade has passed me by. I am alone in victory and my enemy wears a smile.
The night after Ashe rode back into the city to the palace on the back of a silver Chocobo with Vaan and Penelo at her side and the streets thronged with weeping, screaming joyous Rabanastrans, was the night the riots broke out in Low Town.
Two years of oppression, fear, and prejudice reached boiling point and the people of Rabanastre, men and women, and even children, Penelo had known all her life, became strangers – villains all – as they surged up from under the city to attack the departing Imperial regiments.
For two years those clanking, hidden men, with their gruff and crude voices had ruled over her kinsmen. They had driven the shop-keepers from their homes above the Bazaar and shoved the women and children into the sewers. The tales of the Imperial soldiers' abuses had become so well known they barely rated repeating. Yet Penelo was still unprepared for the tide of vengeance that turned even the kindest Rabanastran soul into a monster.
On the very night of Rabanastre's liberation, when men and women should have been dancing in the streets and savouring a new tomorrow, they instead gathered clumsy clubs of wood and kitchen knives, draped their knuckles in metal, and made weapons from socks filled with sand and stones.
Like packs of baying Lobos they prowled the streets of their home with flaming torches and tracked the Imperials through the streets. Once again, just like the night of the Imperials arrival, the children were forced into hiding under the stairs and in cellars, as bloody vengeance painted the streets.
The first man to fall to the tide of Rabanastre's stoked fury broke Penelo's heart.
She and Vaan, tempered by battle and no longer able to cower in a cupboard under the stairs had taken to the streets as well. They chased down the madness that had stolen over friends and family alike, trying to stem the flood of violence before it broke over the city.
Somehow, in the chaos of the flickering torches, the curses and the cruel shouts, the crack and splinter of broken glass and the pounding of furious feet on cobbles, Penelo had become separated from Vaan.
Hurrying through the streets of her home, made unfamiliar through long absence, and the ugly pall of fear that pervaded the dark night, where not a single star dared light the way of the mob, Penelo ran.
Loaded down with her satchel of curatives and healing supplies she skidded over the carpet of glass shards and jumped over the cracked and shattered boards of doors ripped from hinges.
Houses had been ransacked and the mob, howling with one monstrous voice, had broken down doors and shattered windows seeking out Imperials hiding in the buildings that had once been Rabanatran family homes.
Penelo was skittering past the fountain at the South Gate when the explosion rocked the ground under her feet. She stumbled against the lip of the fountain and as she right her balance she noticed, in the orange glare of the fireball devouring a house across the plaza, writing daubed across the wall of a nearby building.
Burn the Imperial scum – make them bleed like the pigs they are.
Underneath the wicked declaration Penelo saw the slumped form of a man, head lolling on his chest, and one leg bent at a monstrous angle. She was moving before she was consciously aware of it, beginning the incantation for Curaga as she threw herself to her knees beside the man.
He was not in armour but instead in his night clothes. Her countrymen, her neighbours, and her friends, had dragged this young man from his bed and beaten him like a dog before leaving him to die in the street.
Her hands shook as she stared at his compound fractured left leg, the white nub of bone protruding from ruptured flesh. His dark hair, inky black and fine (reminding her of Larsa's) was matted with blood. His face was pale under a patchwork of contusions and blossoming bruises.
Trembling Penelo reached out and placed a hand glowing with green-white healing magick to the man's chest. The body groaned, shifting in pain and suffering as the healing magick revived him a little. He lifted his head to stare up at Penelo with one blackened eye swollen and welded shut and the other dazed with pain.
'You!'
Penelo recoiled in horror, jerking her hand back, as a wave of memory, as vibrant and all-consuming as the Mist wave that had erupted from the Pharos of Ridorana, assailed her.
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...
The Imperial soldier caught her arm as she tried to stand. She quivered with the desire to turn tail and run away from this man she had not seen in two years but whose face frequented her nightmares. As she jerked her grip from his fumbling fingers they left blood stains, black as tar in the darkness, across her bare arms.
'……y..you are that young lady from Low Town, the one….' the man's voice was barely more than a thread as he peered up at her through a mask of drying blood with one dark eye that just for a moment reminded her of another black eyed Archadian.
Penelo shook her head rapidly, forgetting why she was here this night that reminded her so strongly of that other night two years ago. Memory and nightmare yawned open and swallowed her whole.
Hot, slick, sweat oiled skin sliding and grinding against her own. The rough bit of cold, scuffed stone under her back, digging into her shoulder blades and she fought helplessly to get out from underneath the man. The stink of ale, hot and fetid, blasting her face as the man's breath dampened her hair.
Tears prickled her eyelids and her chest contracted violently as in the present of this horrid night, where Ashe's victory and all their sacrifice was brought down to dust by the anger, the fury, and the stupidity of the very people they had fought for, the man she had feared to face for two years weakly reached for her again.
'……Please miss, it ain't safe f'yer to be out on a night like this…..urhhh……anger makes beasts o' all men. Miss, yer must find shelter. With the rising o'the sun all will be right as rain again, yer'll see.'
She remembered the sheer mind shattering terror and incomprehension as Mr Haralambos, the man who had been her father's business partner in their small leather goods store, had lunged at her. The soup and bread she had brought the man in the picnic basket she had prepared especially by hand, spilled out across the floor of the hovel in Low Town Mr Haralambos drank his days away in since the occupation.
The warm, inviting scent of Cluckatrice soup, mingled with the scent of blood, as her nails tore into the shoulders of the man above her.
She had not screamed back then, as the man (her father's friend, a man who had given her piggy-back rides as a little girl) used his large hands that had once made harnesses and saddles and all manner of delicate leather goods, to push apart her legs. She did not scream because she simply could not fathom that this was happening.
How could someone she had known all her life become a monster; how could a man, any man, turn upon a girl of fourteen who had simply tried to bring him food and company in his misery?
'Oi you! Stop!'
Penelo had not registered the sound of the voice or the clank of armoured feet, until gauntleted hands had wrenched the drunkard Haralambos off of her and thrown him roughly into the wall.
Too scared to cry Penelo had scuttled backwards across the rough floor and into a corner of the room, where she curled up in fear as the Imperial (the enemy, the evil that had ruined her life and stolen Rabanastre's freedom) punched the slurring, snarling Haralambos in the nose and knocked him out.
Then slowly the metal menace, who had seemingly saved her, had turned to face her, a man of metal, face hidden behind an impenetrable helmet and Penelo's breathing had stopped altogether.
If her own countryman, and a man who was known to her, could become a fiend in Hume guise, attacking her for no reason, then what horrors would a soulless Imperial perpetrate upon her?
The soldier raised his gauntleted hands and pulled off his helmet, letting it crash to the floor with a hard crack of metal against stone.
'There now love, no need to fret, yer a-right now.'
Penelo stared up into the face of the enemy revealed and saw not a monster with cruel eyes of steel but a young man with inky black hair and dark, kindly eyes who squatted down on the ground level with her and reached out one hand, maintaining a careful distance.
'Are yer hurt? Don't look like that bloody drunken sot did yer damage, but I can take yer t'barracks an' get yer seen t' if'n yer like?'
Penelo was shaking so hard her teeth chattered. She could only stare in total incomprehension as the man continued to hold out his hand and talk to her in soft, low, soothing tones.
She stared into that man's eyes and could see only concern. She stared as deep as she could willing herself to see the hate and cruelty she had been told was in all Imperials, but all she saw was Hume-kindness.
'What's yer name petal?' he continued and even his strange, guttural, rough speech did not sound grating or vicious to her ears as it always had before when she had heard the words of the other Imperials.
'Me name is Timonda. Now, now, pet, I'll not hurt you, so stop yer tears, a-right?'
She stared at that hand, held out across the distance between, and into the eyes of the enemy who had saved her, and it was all too much. She did not understand how this could be; an Imperial showed her kindness and a Rabanastran abused her? If she could not trust her kin to be kind and her enemy to be merciless then what could she depend on?
What manner of world did she live in that evil could wear the face of a friend and kindness belonged to the object of her hate?
With sudden violence fourteen year old Penelo had lunged forward shoving the Imperial in the chest as hard as she could and running from the building faster, almost, than her legs could carry her. She never saw Timonda again but his unsolicited kindness had haunted her ever more.
Until this night.
The lights of the mob's torches grew brighter and the flames devouring the row of houses across the plaza stroked heat against her back. Penelo reached out a shaking hand once more to Timonda, the Imperial who had come to her aid and showed her kindness all those years ago, 'My name is Penelo, Mr Timonda.'
The man smiled at her and she saw that his front teeth had been knocked out, 'Penelo? What a pretty name.'
She bit her lip on tears as she summoned healing magick to her hands aware, with every frantic heartbeat, of the thunder of the mob approaching. She wondered if they could scent the blood of Imperial in the night air.
'…..Miss, t'mob will be back in no time. They'll not recognise friend from foe in this fervour…..urgn…..please miss….I begs yer, be off wit' yer while there's still time.'
'No.'
Penelo pressed her hands, cupping healing magick, over the shattered bone in his leg, the worst of his many injuries, and he stifled a cry of pain.
She would not leave this man. She would not let one good man die simply because he was born Archadian and found himself on the losing side of a war the Empire had believed long won.
If she let Timonda die, Penelo knew with bedrock certainty, she would never be able to walk unafraid again.
For just a moment, as the strobe red and orange sulphur flashes of the mob's torches rounded a corner into the plaza and the first shout denoted that they had been detected, Penelo's mind flashed back to the last night in Balfonheim, the last time she had battled with her fear and slept in the bed of a man with dark Archadian eyes.
That man, the only man she had never feared, was gone now too: dead or merely vanished into legend, she did not know, and she thought it did not really matter. All that mattered was that Penelo had a debt of gratitude to repay to this soldier.
'Penelo!'
Vaan almost vaulted over the fountain as he outran the mob and skidded towards her. There was a gash bisecting his forehead and his hair was wildly tousled from skirmishes with the mob. In the firelight he seemed almost to be glowing like quicksilver.
'Vaan – help me with Timonda – they'll kill him!'
Vaan looked from her to the bleeding, only half-conscious, Imperial beside her who was still dressed in his tattered cotton pyjama's and bare feet. Without a word Vaan reached down and threw the man's arm over his shoulders and hefted him up. He asked no questions of why she wanted to save a member of the occupation forces, or why she knew his name.
Penelo had never loved Vaan more than she did at that very moment.
Rushing to Timonda's other side she pulled his free arm across her shoulders and she and Vaan did their best to run with him as the mob bayed and screamed behind them.
She and Vaan ducked and dived through the narrow, twisted, streets of home, the shadows of the night leaping out to harass them, and the firelight burning up the darkness behind their backs. Penelo began to despair; they would never escape with Timonda dead-weight in their arms.
In less time than it took to tell of it she, Vaan, and Timonda, were backed up against a dead-end; the vast city wall rising up like an immutable barrier preventing escape. As one, the three of them turned to meet the faceless mob; each formless aggressor forged of hate and darkness and daubed in the blood of their former oppressors.
In the blinking of an eye and turning of fate the roles of victim and aggressor, virtuous and villainous had been reversed and Ashe's new horizon for Ivalice was lost before the new sun had risen.
Vaan's hand reached out to grasp Penelo's arm across Timonda's body as they hit the wall with their backs and stared into the mass of fire flecked bodies moving in on them, intent on tearing them limb from limb. She and Vaan shared one glance over Timonda's hanging head and Vaan smiled.
'Huh, guess we won't get to be sky pirates after all.'
A bugle horn sounded through the night and Penelo jolted as the skittering clatter of a dozen Chocobo mounted Dalmascan cavalry filled the narrow alley. The new arrivals crowded into the mob with pikes drawn.
The leader of the cavalry charge, mounted on a Chocobo whose head was plumed with white gold, lifted the visor of her helmet and Ashe's furious iced grey eyes seemed to rake over every obscured face in the mob.
'What is the meaning of this? How dare you raise arms in my city when I have decreed that no harm should befall the departing Archadian troops; disperse at once or I shall have you all thrown into the Nalbina dungeons!'
As Ashe quelled the mob with no more than her anger and barbed voice, Penelo and Vaan slunk through the crowds with Timonda in tow.
'Miss…..why did yer do this fer me? I'm jus' an Imperial.'
Timonda asked in vague and confused voice on the edge of consciousness as they finally found the Imperial army cruiser docked outside the city that would take Timonda and the other soldiers home come the first light of dawn.
Penelo smiled as she rooted in her satchel for a collection of healing potions and pushed them into Timonda's hands, 'Because you were kind to me, Mr Timonda, and I never did say thank you.'
She and Vaan watched the Imperial Cruiser depart the city as the sun rose over the desert, and as it, did Penelo finally felt like the war she had fought for two years was truly over.
She did not have to be afraid any more.
If I die tomorrow, how would you know I lived? Is this body, flesh and blood as any other, mine; or am I merely prisoner within my own anonymous flesh?
After the Imperial army had left Rabanastre life began to return, if not to what it had been before, then to something that promised to one day be better than any life they had lost.
Still it took a month after Bahamut's fall before Penelo plucked up the courage to enter the Strahl.
Vaan, under Nono's suspiciously watchful eyes, had spent hours teaching himself what each knob, button, and dial on the Strahl did, and eventually he all but dragged Penelo from Migelo's store for the first (non Bahamut related) flight.
The flight was uneventful; they merely ducked and dived over the Sandsea and down to the Ozmone Plains, stopped for a visit with the Garif at Jahara, and then returned to the aerodrome.
Afterwards as Vaan poked about in the engine room and annoyed Nono with his mere presence, Penelo snuck into Balthier's cabin.
Entering the stillness of the cabin she felt like an intruder, even though she had once barged in without invitation and had spent three peaceful hours dozing in this very bunk while listening to the rhythmic ticking of his dozen clocks.
The air inside the cabin was cool and even the ticking of the clocks seemed muted and subdued. The stillness and quiet seemed almost like a form of mourning.
Rubbing her bare arms against the slight chill, Penelo began her covert and methodical search. The easel with the incomplete portrait of her was most likely still tucked into a corner of her old room in Reddas' manse, but somewhere in this neat, small, space Balthier must have kept his art supplies.
An hour later, after she had rooted through carefully folded piles of white cotton shirts, letting her fingers caress the soft cloth and brush against the gold thread at the cuffs, she found that which she sought.
The art supply case she remembered from the night she had first kissed him was found, ironically enough, after she had exhausted all other possible places, tucked under the sleeping bunk and secured for flight by a tether of rope attached to a hook on the wall under the bed.
Feeling like a thief indeed, Penelo opened up the valise bag, the butter soft leather comfortably worn under her hands, and peered inside.
She found a sketchbook filled with pictures of Fran (though he had told her Fran did not let him draw her) and even one or two half finished sketches of Ashe that had been started and then abandoned.
As Penelo flicked back through the dog-eared pages a series of incredibly detailed diagrams of Bandercouerls and Panthers, Malboros, and even a Behemoth, stalked across the flapping pages, some of them chased by annotated notes on anatomy as if he was studying the fiends even as he drew them.
When she came to last page her fingers stilled. This image was different than any other, because it had not been completed in impartial black and white. Instead a riot of colour, predominant in pinks and vibrant blues, seemed to jump out at her.
This was no portrait or careful, anatomically correct, sketch of something the eye had seen while he travelled across Ivalice. Instead this was an image of smoke rising from a Bhujerban hookah; the long necked glass tube with its rounded base held a magical swirl of curlicuing smoke and vapour as the pipe and mouth piece sinuously wound about the base of the hookah like a serpent.
The twisting, intermeshing, interweaving curls and whorls of smoke pin-wheeled in drifting pastel colours before her eyes until Penelo began to feel dizzy, almost as if she had been breathing in the weed smoke herself, instead of merely looking at a picture.
It seemed almost as if the serpent tails of the smoke and vapour formed images and pictures of recognisable things to her eyes before falling away into formless dreamy twists and blurs of colour.
Penelo had not known, at first, what she might find when she decided to give in to the dull ache inside her chest and search through Balthier's possessions on the off chance that he had left some token of beauty for her now he was gone.
Now, staring down at this strange, dreamlike image in colours rich as they were gentle, she found herself smiling even as one large tear plopped from her cheek to land on the paper.
Wiping away the tear Penelo closed the sketchbook and replaced the rest of the objects she had taken from the art supply bag before returning it securely to its place under the bunk. She left Balthier's cabin with his notebook her own pilfered prize, clutched closely to her chest.
It was four months later that she visited a reclusive woman in her small house in the east of the city and showed her the page of coloured smoke as she held out her bare arms.
'That is the pattern I want.'
She told the woman, a master of the art of painting flesh, as she laid down the Gil she had saved for the last two weeks.
It took two days in total for the tattoos to be complete; a spreading, meandering, trail of blue and pink serpentine streamers running down her arms from shoulder to wrist, but when they were done Penelo felt a great sense of satisfaction.
Ever since the war had ended Penelo had felt like a stranger staring into a mirror. Her reflection did not fit her soul and the simple, unadorned, young girl who blinked out at her from the mirror or the fountains waters, seemed a lie.
Penelo was not that girl anymore, and as she had been lucky and well sheltered by those around her during Ashe's quest, she had not any scars to mark the passage her soul had taken or to denote all that she had learned.
Therefore she had decided to mark her flesh in colour and ink, make of herself a work of subtle art, because there was no dark eyed and sharp tongued Archadian in the shadows to make her beautiful anymore.
I am a dancer. I have danced in the gutter and I have danced upon the stars. I have danced for want of a partner and I have danced to the beat of a thousand feet. I am a dancer but I am never alone.
'Vaan, I can't…..it's been too long!'
She tried to slap his hands off her as Vaan pushed and prodded her through the thick crowds of cheering Rabanastrans who thronged the street to mark a whole year since the liberation.
'Sure you can; Penelo it's not like this is something you can forget, and I know you want to.'
Music wound its way through the streets to the beat of a thousand feet and the high singing of flutes and fiddles. A strange bubbling excitement filled her as she rubbed her bare arms and allowed Vaan to sheppard her through the mass of people towards the stage facing the palace.
'Migelo went to a lot of trouble to fix you up with a place in the dance, Pen, and if anyone has a right to dance to victory it's you.'
Vaan physically hoisted her up at the waist and unceremoniously dumped her onto the wooden stage, which was quilted in Galbana stems and a constant fall of rice and confetti from the people waving flags and calling from the open windows of the houses throughout the Royal Plaza.
'But what if I miss a step?'
Vaan shrugged 'Then you fall over. Penelo, we brought down Vayne Solidor, so what are you worrying about a dance for?'
Penelo opened her mouth and then clicked it closed once more. She didn't have an answer to that and as Vaan was swallowed in the pressing crowds, Penelo found herself being pulled up in the line of other dancers. She felt both anxious with nerves and exuberant with joy at the thought of dancing again before a crowd.
As she took her place the trumpets sounded and the (not yet coronated) Queen of Dalmasca stepped out onto her balcony to formerly open proceedings.
Although it seemed unlikely, Penelo felt like Ashe looked straight at her, picking her out of the line-up of blonde and scanty clad Dalmascan girls, as she looked upon the stage. For a moment grey eyes warmed in a smile of greeting and it seemed strange to Penelo that she had not seen or spoken to Ashe in a whole year. Time was always racing on, it seemed, but today at least Penelo would give time a run for its Gil.
The band began to play and Penelo began to dance as above her head streaks of bunting and coloured papers rained down through a faultless cerulean sky.
As she raised her arms to that gorgeous endless sky, it seemed that the rest of the world fell away, and Penelo was not merely one girl in a chorus of dancers, but alone, feet pounding over sun heated wooden boards and the pungent crush of Galbana petals.
When she threw up her arms towards the wisps of scudding clouds drifting over the luminous sky she felt as if she could touch like pulsing, vibrant blue and dip her fingers into the palette of creation. When she stamped her foot, a hundred million feet stamped to her beat, and when she twisted and pivoted and swayed to the winding grace of the music she felt as though she could reach out and still the hands of time.
Have no fear of me, my dear, I harbour no designs on your virtue; your chastity is a coin I have no wish to spend.
The sounds of thousands of clapping hands became the wing beats of birds raising her to the outer limits and pushing her to the very edge of the stage and she swirled around and around and around, a blur of gold, pink and blue, her feet pricking on the thorns of Galbana lilies and kicking up a whirl of crushed brilliant scarlet petals.
Galbana, rich and thick and heady, perfumed the air as Penelo danced; her limbs stretching and thrusting and arching almost violently as she threw herself into a dance that followed the beating of her own heart.
Quite the little savage, aren't you my dear?
Dancing on the very edge, Penelo did not even know that she had broken from formation and that the rest of the dancers, and even the musicians, now caught up in her fervour, sought only to catch the tail of her blazing trail and dance and follow her beat.
She did not see the Queen, high upon her parapet, stamp her own foot and clap her hands to Penelo's dance as old wounds were washed clean and ghosts exorcised to better places with every fluid, dream-like movement.
Because I am far too fond of you, my dear, to ruin such a friendship.
Colours spun behind Penelo's tightly closed eyelids as she pounded the boards of the stage and twisted like a single blade of grass in a hurricane.
It seemed to those that watched her that Penelo must surely twist and leap straight into the sky, rising on wings of air, as she danced and the people cried and the music stroked the heavens with its joyous fury; the beating of a thousand feet stopping the running of time itself.
Penelo could not turn back the clock and erase all the hurt that had been, neither could she prevent the dawning of tomorrow. Time was not hers to steal away and hold locked up for fear of losing. Yet today, in this one moment of pink and blue and gold and scarlet, she could create a memory that would never fade.
As she came out of one wild pirouette she had the strangest feeling of being caught between to opposing forces as she caught sight of Vaan's beaming face in the crowds as he called himself hoarse screaming her on. Vaan was slick and warm as the sun and bright and bold as light itself but it was the shadows that called to Penelo.
For we could all be dead on the morrow.
A prickling at the back of her neck almost caused her to shiver as she collapsed, panting, to her knees at the edge of the stage to the thunderous applause of the people of Rabanastre.
Penelo did not give into temptation and turn around as the strange conviction stole over her that, somewhere in the shadows of that quiet darkness that was always watchful even in the brilliant sun, a pair dark hooded eyes watched her and a pen moved with the speed of thought across a pad of pure white paper.
There now, let the illusion be unspoiled.
She did not turn around because it would not do to catch the thief in the act, and because it would hurt too much to find merely bland shadow at her back.
If words are but the accents of action then my performance is merely a memory of all I dream to be. My act is ne'er done and my sleep is rarely peaceful. I am the leading man.
Penelo's string bag of supplies dropped and spilled all over the aerodrome hangar floor as she stared, dumb-founded, at the empty space once filled by the Strahl. She ran over to Vaan in panic; the idea of losing the Strahl monstrous to her.
It was then that something caught her eye. A large square shaped package, barely thicker than two of her fingers together, and perhaps a foot tall and the same again wide. It was affixed to a crystal lamp that struggled to stay aloft against the added weight.
Vaan caught hold of the brown paper wrapped object and pulled it free of the floating lamp. A small velvet pouch fell from the corner of the odd package and dropped to the aerodrome floor alongside a scrawled note as Vaan tore free the paper from what was revealed to be an oak wood picture frame.
'Whoa.'
Vaan breathed as they both freed from the paper, the painted portrait of a girl, caught in the maelstrom of a dance with her arms aloft above her head and face tilted up towards the sky. Swirls of pulsing pink and vibrant blue, picked out with splashes of livid red petals, filled the picture as if the girl, whose hair trailed around her body like a shower of yellow sparks, danced at the very centre of creation.
In the very bottom right hand corner two words had been etched in sharp black paint strikes, contrasting bolding with the riotous colours of the portrait.
Penelo: Resplendence
The scrap of paper with the note completed the message of the painting: I await in Bervenia.
Perhaps it was wishful thinking, perhaps it was pure conceit, but to Penelo it seemed that simple message was written for her and her alone.