Ark of the Nethirym
Chapter II
Waking up was less than pleasant, as Penelo was driving Vaan mad. Well, alright, if he had to admit it, she was just adding to the problem. He had what could only be considered an epic headache. In fact, headache was too mild a word. There had to be another term for the mind numbing, nauseating, disturbing level of agony in his skull. And Penelo's pacing wasn't helping. He could hear every footfall like she was stomping on a kettle drum. Vaan summoned up his reserves and tried to tell her to stop, but all that came out was a clumsy moan.
It had the desired effect, though. She stopped moving.
He cracked a gray eye open, cautiously, and was met with bright lights searing into his head and the sight of a very frazzled Penelo staring at him like he'd just oozed up out of a drain pipe in Garamsythe. He wondered if that meant he looked as bad as he felt, or even half as bad as she looked. And maybe he did. Aside from his head aching terribly--much of him, in fact, hurt. He couldn't remember much that felt like recent memory. But he certainly didn't recall going 10 rounds with a Wild Saurian, without benefit of a weapon on hand.
Still, memories or not, he felt like he'd been eaten, chewed vigorously and then shat out after a good, long digestion. All that was left was to figure out why.
"Pen," he croaked, his throat surprisingly dry. "Wh…why are you staring at me like that?" He realized almost immediately it wasn't the question he'd intended to ask, but it was a start.
Penelo, for her part, gamely overcame her shock at seeing Vaan acting like, well...himself, and retrieved a cup of water. She lifted his shoulders as best she could, watching his face closely as he seemed to vacillate between confusion and discomfort. Only the effort wasn't going smoothly. "Vaan, you need to help me here. You're too damn heavy."
Vaan's customary 'Oh' expression would have been funny, even reassuring, were things not gone so very wrong. But at last he finally started working in a coordinated effort with her to get somewhat upright.
Vaan took the offered cup and drank deeply, ignoring the shaking in his hands. When he looked up, Penelo was still starring at him like he'd sprouted an extra head. This was getting old. "Penelo, if I've been horribly disfigured by whatever caused this headache..."
She snorted. "You aren't disfigured, bonehead." A moment later she blushed and looked away. "What do you remember?" she asked quietly.
Vaan had no idea what it was that she didn't want to tell him. Whatever it was, it must have been a doozy. He rubbed his temples trying to give Penelo some kind of answer. "I…uh…I guess I remember finding the island. And I know we found a big chamber. I think I healed you up a bit right after that." Vaan searched, but couldn't seem to find anything else solid to fill the spaces. "Everything else after that is…" He paused, frowning. "It's not there." This was very not good. All Vaan could piece together were scattered sensations of darkness...fear. And his head still felt like it was splitting in two--not a confidence builder. There could only be one explanation. "I hit my head, didn't I?"
Penelo coughed out a laugh that almost immediately turned into a choked sob.
Shocked as he was by her unusual outburst, Vaan figured it was fortunate he wasn't prone to thinking of Penelo as an actual, regular girl. Elsewise he wouldn't have known what in Ivalice to do in the face of her tears. But since she was just Penelo, he knew exactly what to do. "Hey, c'mere..." Vaan tossed the empty cup onto the bed and opened his arms. She hesitated a moment and then plopped on the bed beside him, laying her head on his shoulder. He did his best to wrap her in a comforting embrace, stiff and sore as he was. "Penelo, whatever's wrong, you can tell me. In fact, I wish you would. I'm a little lost here." He may have felt like the ass-end of a bad fight, but whatever else was going on, he was alive. Everything else was up from there. "Something definitely chewed me up and spit me out. But I'm still here, Pen. It's all okay now."
That only seemed to make things worse and Penelo started to cry in earnest then. At which point Vaan decided he was better off shutting up, since either something truly terrible had happened or he'd forgotten to check the calender and poor Penelo was back around to that time of the lunar cycle again. Whatever the cause, the tears didn't last. A few more moments of indistinct, muffled words were sobbed into Vaan's shoulder and then Penelo righted herself, wiping off her cheeks with the heel of her hand. "Sorry, I've had a bad day." She sniffled, trying to smile encouragingly.
Vaan thought her smile was laughably unconvincing. And as swollen and blotchy red as she was, just a little grisly. "You gonna tell me what's up?" he asked softly, holding back a wince as she shifted in his arms.
Penelo took a deep breath, 'It sounds so unlikely. And yet all the trouble we've seen. It's also kind of... so very... uhm... You?" She snorted a halfhearted laugh and buried her face in his shoulder again.
Vaan held Penelo as firmly as he could, ignoring the growing fatigue weighting him down. Whatever happened must have included getting his skull bashed in. The room started dimming around the edges, leaving him feeling at once panicked and annoyed. He didn't want to pass out, but Vaan had every idea it was coming anyway.
Penelo wiped her face again, searching for the words to explain as best she could, but a peripheral glance at Vaan made her pause. All the color was draining from his face. He definitely looked unwell. "Vaan, what's wrong?" He'd started to sway, sitting there. So Penelo slid out of his loosening grasp and guided him to lay back down. "Vaan, can you hear me?" She tapped his cheek softly.
The room was suddenly cold to Vaan--very, very cold. Not only that, an odd weight started building at the back of his skull. He shook his head, trying to dislodge the deepening sensation, but that only set the room to spinning worse. An instant later the headache he'd awoken with crescendoed to a bright, hot spike through his entire skull and Vaan curled into himself trying to escape it, biting down on a scream so hard his teeth ground and his jaw spasmed.
"Vaan!" Penelo called him again.
He could hear the panic in her voice and wanted to say something, anything, so that she didn't cry again. He hated it when Penelo cried. But words were suddenly outside of his reach. Everything was becoming distant, detached through a haze of shadow and pain. He barely felt her hands on his shoulders anymore, barely felt the bed beneath him.
"Vaan, please! What's happening?"
He tried hard to focus on her plea, beyond the spreading fire in his skull. But a hungry darkness was overtaking his awareness, clouding over everything. It was a black ledge into nothingness, and Vaan was slid over it and falling before he ever knew how to stop himself.
It was then that he remembered... He wasn't alone in the dark.
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It took Penelo several minutes to realize she was no longer holding onto Vaan, but rather something else entirely. His fingers had stopped gripping and clawing at his skull, falling lax. The terrible shaking had subsided. Though oddly, Vaan felt somehow hotter in her hands. He laid there, terribly still, his breath the only movement he made. She'd slid her lap under his head, stroking his brow, assuming he was unconscious--at first.
Then suddenly his eyes popped open and locked onto her. Only, they weren't Vaan's eyes. Not the soft gray she was used to--these eyes were a cold, bright blue. And Glowing...
Penelo let go like she'd been burnt and jumped up off the bed, backing away until she came up against the wall. The unnatural eyes tracked her every movement, languidly predatory. The expression spoke volumes of the change--Vaan had never looked so eerily shrewd.
But then, this wasn't Vaan. This was doubtless Balthier's entity.
Minutes passed with her feeling pinned like cornered prey, though it hadn't yet offered to move off the bed. Slowly, confusion took over Vaan's features from the awful look of patient hunger. Gradually his hands slid up to clamp around his head--just as before--and he twisted and struggled on the bed.
"Get out of here Penelo!" he screeched hoarsely. "Run! Now!"
She was out the door like a shot, code locking it behind her, desperately hoping that whatever had hold of Vaan couldn't get at his memories of the ship. Else wise she was sunk.
Penelo flinched at the wail of agony seeping through the door and ran all the way to the bridge, locking herself in there as well.
She was well cried-out by the time Balthier and Fran found them.
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"Penelo! Are you there? Can you hear me?" Balthier almost kicked the cockpit control console. Almost slammed the com-link with his fist, almost yanked the hand unit from its base and threw it across the deck of his bridge. Almost. Only, Leading men never lost their tempers, especially not in fits of apprehension. "Will that girl never answer?" He slumped back in his captain's chair, raking his hands through his hair.
Fran didn't get nearly as riled as her hume partner--despite Balthier's frequently nonchalant facade. It simply wasn't in her nature. So she strummed her claws over the Strahl's controls, pretending not to sense Balthier's anxiety. Sometimes it was just better to let children work things out as they saw fit. "She will answer us soon. Be patient."
"Patience is a luxury we can ill afford at the moment, Fran. If things have fallen apart as I fear, then neither Vaan nor Penelo have time on their side." Balthier launched himself out of his chair and paced around the small cockpit a few times. Eventually he settled for standing, looking out over the vast expanse of land and sky before them. He didn't bother stifling the sigh building within him.
Much as he hated to admit it, he felt guilty over this whole thing, on numerous levels. Which in itself was unacceptable. Guilt was for ground bound humes with their pedestrian morals and mores--not for sky pirates. But it was an undeniable fact, leaving the boy behind and disappearing without a trace had led the desert chit into more trouble than Balthier ever could have expected. But then, that wasn't true either. He should have expected it. Truth was, Balthier knew the boy's penchant for misadventure from long ago. Worse yet, he knew how ferociously Vaan would hold onto what few ties he had. He should have anticipated that Vaan wouldn't give up easily.
Balthier had been sure that at the time, it was the best course for them both. Crash landing the Bahamut had seemed like the perfect invitation for a clean break. Save the city and take what fate was offering, the ideal get away. Balthier had fondly watched the fair-haired desert youth grow from vagrant thief, to intrepid adventurer to confident hero. What Vaan had needed next--in Balthier's esteemed opinion--was his own ship to command, his own destiny to follow. What Balthier had needed for himself was a clean severing of what was becoming an emotional tangle. Leading men didn't get 'tangled'. They saved the princess and then flew off into the sunset.
Leading men didn't take on attractive, scurrilous young apprentices with a mind to making permanent romantic attachments with them.
And Balthier could admit that much at least, that it was an emerging romantic interest he felt for the boy. Certainly though, nothing worth putting either his freedom or Vaan's at risk. It wasn't the first time Balthier had found himself forming an unwanted attachment. It was the risk of owning a hume heart, as Fran was so fond of pointing out to him. It wasn't even the first time he'd left behind someone he cared about in order to protect his own interests. As with others in his past, Balthier followed the urge to find an expedient, surgical way of ending things before they got messy.
In this case, distance.
Problem was, this time it hadn't worked. Apparently the rotten little thief had nipped him but good, stealing some small but vital piece of Balthier for himself. Nearly two years had gone by and Balthier's thoughts still strayed to Vaan, nearly daily. He still dreamed of sun kissed skin and warm gray eyes. His fingers still itched for the feel of soft, unruly, platinum hair. He still worried enough to have been keeping tabs on the youth, long before Larsa had hired him to. He still missed the boy enough to ache at every bittersweet memory.
Damn the comely desert rat…
Now Vaan was arse over elbows into trouble…again. This time something so terrible and so difficult, and oh so avoidable. Had the youth just given up looking for Balthier, if he'd just let things lie, he'd be safe roaming the skies. None the wiser. If Balthier had just once reached out to assure the boy. A small interaction to buy them time. One right word might have averted this.
Of course, if Balthier had just bedded the boy during their original adventures--as he'd desired--they wouldn't be in this fix either. Without his virginity intact, Vaan wouldn't have made a proper receptacle for the darkness locked away inside of him now. The irony of the circumstance was staggering. Never before had depriving himself ever caused such trouble. Lesson to the wise, next time Balthier wanted something, it was just better for everyone if he took it.
So much for that perfect getaway.
Several minutes passed in uncomfortable silence, a holding pattern of waiting. The afternoon sun shone over the Cerobi Steppe, sprawled out below them. Balthier was reminded that he'd always thought that from above, the terrain looked like the form of a mangled woman. That earned yet another moody sigh from him.
Fran's ears twitched and she glanced up at Balthier. "This isn't your fault," she offered. "Ever the desert child has chosen for himself. And there are others at work in this."
Balthier didn't waste time being annoyed at her insights anymore. He'd never admit it, but if not for his Viera partner, he might not see himself nearly so clear. One of her best assets was being the lens through which he viewed his weaknesses. "Stop reading my mind, Fran. It's dreadfully rude," he drawled.
Then he tensed as he spotted something in the distant sky. "Besides, there's the Galbana, and only just fashionably late at that." He pursed his lips in a smug smirk. "Didn't I say this would all work out in the end? All we had to do was be patient."
Fran let loose a long-suffering hiss of air, rolling her eyes. "We shall go meet them?" she asked, allowing the barest hint of annoyance into her tone.
"I think we'd best." Then the facade fell for a moment and Balthier swung the Arcturus onto his shoulder. He pinned his partner with a serious look. "Fran, be ready for anything."
"The boy is strong." Fran peered at Balthier thoughtfully. "But indeed, preparation is wise."
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*Next chapter, Balthier meets Vaan's houseguest.