The Fortress at Nalbina

A/N: This is a scene that doesn't contain Ashe, which breaks tradition but I thought I should shed light on Balthier and Fran's relationship - because just as any suitor for Ashe must remember she will always look to Dalmasca's wellbeing first, so too must any suitor for Balthier remember that he will not willingly be parted from his partner Fran.

' The Queen is keeping you in some style, I see.'

Balthier looked up from the reams of paper scattered over the table top as the door to his set of rooms in one of Nalbina's many towers opened and Fran sauntered in.

' A gilded cage is still a cage Fran.'

He muttered returning to the impressively pedantic formal writ of his crimes that the officious and humourless Chief Justice of Dalmasca had sent to him, Balthier having decided to defend himself in his upcoming trial.

Fran interestingly was being completely ignored in terms of her part in any of those aforementioned crimes and was disgustingly free to come and go as she pleased.

' You have enacted no escape, I see.'

Fran perched herself with nonchalant elegance on the counterpane of the rather nice four poster bed in the reasonably appointed bedroom/dining/ lounge area of his personal 'prison'.

'And cause an unfortunate political incident as the long arm of Dalmascan law stretches after me all over Ivalice? I think not.'

Balthier rubbed at his eyes, refusing to even contemplate that he might soon need reading glasses.

' I just don't understand what she's playing at Fran.' He admitted irritably throwing the official writ from him to flutter down on the table top.

Fran quirked an eyebrow, rose languidly to the table and picked up the Writ. Balthier watched her as she sat back down on the bed, crossed one leg over the other and read the transcript. Her brows stitched together and she looked up at him.

' I had thought you were here due to allegations of counterfeit Licences?'

'As did I.' Balthier muttered darkly.

He scraped back his chair, wincing as the legs screeched across the untreated stone floor and crossed the small room to crawl onto the foot of the bed, flopping backwards and stretching his arms across the covers.

Fran turned her head to look down on him, ' She is angry with you?'

Balthier sighed shifting his body until his head sank into plump pillows at the head of the bed, ' She was, on first being reacquainted, but I had thought she was in fair spirits when she left.'

Fran shifted herself until she sat up against the headboard beside him, her hands demurely folded together across her mid-rift and her phenomenal legs stretched almost the entire length of the bed.

' Why then does Ashe decree our actions on Bahamut as admissible evidence, does this not help your defence more so than her Justice's case against you?'

' To be quite frank, Fran, I have given up trying to fathom the workings of our Queen's mind.'

' You are in ill spirits.'

Balthier snorted derisively, ' This surprises you?'

Fran raised one shoulder in an elegant shrug, 'You are not glad to see her once more? Deny it as you please but you missed her these years past.'

' She arrested me, Fran. On decidedly flimsy grounds I might add.' He pointed out petulantly.

'Did you not create the Licence in question?'

He shot Fran a dark look, ' That is completely beside the point.'

Fran allowed a tiny smile to twitch her lips, ' Strange, that, I had thought your guilt should be the only point of interest in such matters.'

Balthier sat up, unable to lay still in his irritation. ' One bloody Licence after two years of keeping my nose out of her damned country and some very lucrative black markets, and this is the thanks I get.'

Fran pushed an errant strand of hair from her face, hoping to disguise the quivering smile that would not be smothered.

' So she should over turn the laws of her land, the laws under which her subjects are governed for a pirate, one born of her kingdom's former enemy no less?'

' It would be small recompense for saving her kingdom from total annihilation via falling sky fortress.' He retorted.

Balthier flexed his fingers swathed in the gloves he now habitually wore, the gesture having over-taken the little tick of pulling on his cuffs when annoyed these last few years.

' I have brought more ointment, have your hands pained you?' Fran's deft long clawed hand closed around his right gloved hand and began to work the glove off, Balthier deliberately did not look upon his hand.

' This foolish vanity does your hands no good, Balthier, the scar tissue needs air to breath and heal.'

Balthier cast a quick, furtive glance towards his right hand. The skin was red, splotchy and flaking, resembling the scaly flesh of rotting fish in Balthier's mind. The dark purplish tinge of acidic burns further enhanced the ghastly appearance of his hand.

' My hands are fine Fran.' He said disingenuously.

' Do you blame her for this?' She tapped her pointed nails against the scabby carapace which was once the back of his hand.

'Of course not, as I recall our queen did not force us to do something so bloody stupid as to return to a falling sky fortress.' He managed a wane smile for Fran.

'Does she know of your injuries?'

He shrugged diffidently, wishing Fran could be less perceptive.' I did not see that it mattered Fran, what's done is done.'

A smirk twitched to life on his face, which he continued to keep averted as Fran set about peeling some of the loose skin from between his fingers, beginning to spread the ointment on his damaged flesh.

' I did think to use my handicap as a last minute defence in my case should it look to be going against me in the trial.' He added impishly.

Fran sniffed, 'You have regained almost full dexterity in your hands now Balthier, it would be poor defence.'

'Only to those who know, Fran. I thought it could make a rather dramatic counterpoint to proceedings in the trial.' He winked at his partner.

' It does not appear the crime you are guilty of is the one you shall be tried for.' Fran said meditatively.

'Hmm, did you see the part where she has summoned Vaan and Penelo to testify against me? Now, that is ingratitude for you.'

Fran nodded, ' I fail to see her reasoning, unless she truly wishes you dead?'

Balthier shrugged, glad to have his hands back and wriggling them into their gloves while ignoring Fran's disapproval regards the action.

She may wear her scars from Bahamut freely, undaunted by the puckered scar tissue trailing her beautiful legs and torso where she was almost crushed by falling debris, but he was less sanguine.

' Power corrupts as they say.' He replied off-handedly.

' You have freedom to call witnesses to your own defence, whom shall you call?'

Balthier brushed a speck of lint from his silver and white embroidered waistcoat and checked his cuffs, speculatively.

' It is a dilemma.' He agreed mildly, ' Any I might call are either taken by the prosecution or unlikely to take kindly to the summons as they are like to be wanted by the authorities themselves.'

' A disadvantage of a life spent engaged in piracy.' Fran nodded.

' I'd be tempted to call our dear friend Basch, except that he is now his brother, or some such nonsense, and I don't want my trial to become a farce. It is like already to be something of a circus.'

'You would have it no other way.' Fran told him dryly, ' You will have your drama and enjoy every moment, as you well know.'

Balthier chuckled, ' Leading Man and all that Fran.' He conceded unabashed.

Idly, like a man playing absently with a mildly irritating scratch or burn, he picked up the Writ once more.

' I wish I knew what her intentions were Fran. I'd swear she doesn't hold any particularly murderous grudge against me, so why go to all this fuss? A few days in this draughty chamber and a slapped wrist would be sufficient punishment to fit the crime.'

' Does she not hold ill will against you for the manner of your last parting?'

'What parting?' Balthier frowned, ' Before last week when she finally deigned to visit me here in this cage of her devising, I had not laid eyes upon her majesty since we left the Strahl for the Bahamut as it fell.'

Fran gave him an eloquently raised eyebrow in reply. Balthier blinked in surprise.

' You think all this is because of that?'

The idea was ludicrous. What other possible outcome would there have been for the two of them? It wasn't as though a freshly anointed Queen could regularly entertain passing sky pirates, was it?

Ashe had known that any association between them could only be a fleeting one, surely?

Fran continued to give the look that she had not needed to inflict on him in many years, the one that said his stupidity was passing the point of amusement and she was losing patience with him.

Balthier felt himself growing pale, as he realised that of course Ashe would have seen things in a fundamentally different way than he did. Ashe who had remained stolidly in love with a corpse for almost three years, Ashe who did not give up ever, on anything.

Ashe who always stood and fought for what she believed in.

'Damn.'

'Indeed.' Fran agreed dryly.

Balthier barely heard her as he saw his and Ashe's recent reunion here in Nalbina in an entirely new light.

She had seemed oddly imperious, yet strained, and he had thought her response to his minor infringement upon the laws of her country something of an over-reaction in the extreme.

' Oh, bollocks.' He swore as the exact nature of his predicament came to light.

'Indeed.' Fran repeated but this time he could hear the echo of silent laughter that caused minute tremors to rack her shoulders.

'This is no laughing matter Fran.' He snapped; rolling gracefully from the bed, the Writ clutched in his hands, as he started to pace the stone floor.

' She is trying to ruin me!' He fumed.

What other answer was there? Yes, alright, she might have some grounds to be disgruntled with him for the manner of their parting after Bahamut, but he had her best interests in mind.

A blind man could see that while an association with a wanted sky pirate was useful in times of exile and life and death battles with evil empires, it was nothing short of an abdication worthy liability for a new Queen to count among her close acquaintances an Archadian born pirate whose father just happened to be responsible for the destruction of her husband's homeland.

That he had also wanted to put as much distance in terms of land and sky between himself and Ashe for more personal reasons was hardly relevant.

The only good thing Ffamran Bunansa had ever done, before abdicating his life in favour of Balthier, was decide categorically and unequivocally that loving another living being (unless they happened to be a self-sufficient Viera) was a pointless, painful waste of a good life.

'Ashe would still be mounting doomed acts of insurrection from the sewers if it wasn't for the two of us. How dare she presume to put me on trial.' He muttered.

An idea pinged into existence inside his head, and a slanted smile scythed across his face, Fran frowned at him. She knew this particular expression boded only trouble.

' In fact I think I have a capital idea.'

Balthier glanced at the long list of names written on the Writ of all those friends and acquaintances who had been called by the Crown Prosecution of Dalmasca to cast aspersions on his good name. One name was conspicuously absent from the list.

'Balthier?' Fran queried him as he moved to the table and snatched up a quill pen, scratching in a name under the heading witnesses for the defence.

'So her Royal Highness wishes to call me to account, does she? Then I shall return the favour.' He declared triumphantly, grinning.

Fran snatched the paper from him and both her eyebrows rose as she saw the name he had inscribed on the Writ.

'You would call Ashe as your only witness for the defence?' Fran allowed her incredulity to taint her tones.

' Oh, yes.' Balthier nodded empathically, spirits lifting.

'The Queen of Dalmasca, the head of the state that prosecutes you?'

'Show me where it states in the statute books,' Balthier waved at the volumes of Dalmasca's Law Code he had forced himself to read cover to cover in his boredom, 'that a Queen in state cannot be called as a witness in a case of law?'

Fran shook her head, 'You are mad, Hume.'

Balthier frowned at her, 'That's hardly nice.' He muttered aggrieved. He could be rather sensitive in regards to such statements casting doubt on his mental health.

Fran rose from the bed, walking over to him and looked at the Writ thoughtfully for a moment before then folding it neatly and tucking it into a pocket of the tunic she wore, having decided against her battle attire for this visit.

' Why must you Humes play such games? Your ways never cease to astound me.' She sighed.

'I will see this Writ reaches the chief Justice, though I know not how it will be received in Rabanastre.'

Balthier had already returned to the bed and reclined with arrogant confidence, folding his arms behind his head and settling down for an afternoon catnap.

' Thank you Fran. I have enjoyed this visit.'

Fran shook her head in exasperation as she knocked upon the door for the guards to let her out and escort her from the tower. Balthier was not certain but he thought he heard her mutter something more about the madness of Humes in love, but decided to ignore it.