Thanks to emeraldonyxdragon and ElTangoDeRoxanne who are always so super supportive of me in everything, even if I decide to write super wierd things.
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Balthier allowed himself a few more moments to remain comatose, taking in the sounds of the base around him. There was a woman shrieking nearby.
"Good Lord, Barnes, this man is human, and you've killed him. There's nothing. No heartbeat, or body heat, nothing." She was shouting. "You've brought back a corpse trying to tell us it's a machine."
"Kate, I told you, this thing killed a Terminator by ramming it with his shoulder, then dodged a Terminator's fist to blow its head off. You tell me if that's human." The deep voice of Barnes was loud in his ears.
"Fine, I'll run an X-ray. Don't be surprised when we find out he's got bones." The woman, Kate, snapped. Balthier decided now would be a good time to wake up before they ripped the medallion out of his chest upon finding it. He sat up, resisting the desire to tuck his head between his legs when a spell of dizziness hit him. Balthier groaned, feeling his stomach churning, before catching sight of a trash can in the corner. He lurched toward it, collapsing on one knee, and commenced emptying the contents of his stomach into it.
In the meantime, the woman, Kate, screamed. "Oh. My. God. He wasn't dead." She fell against a table, gasping.
"I was tellin' you, he was a machine!" Barnes pointed a finger at him. Balthier slid from a sick crouch next to the trash can into a defensive crouch, ready to spring if need be as Barnes grabbed a pistol.
"Stop it." Kate pushed his arm down. "Even if it is a machine, I intend to help it. Maybe it can help John!"
"It can help John die!" Barnes roared, struggling to lift his arm, but Kate pushed it down again.
"Please, how many times must I protest? I'm no machine!" Balthier moaned, before retching into the garbage can again.
Kate was at his side in an instant, helping him into a more comfortable position.
"See, Barnes? You gave him a concussion when you knocked him out!" she scolded. "Don't go back to sleep, whatever you do, okay? I'll get you an ice pack…" Kate busied herself at the far end of the room, while Barnes kept a watchful eye on Balthier. The sky pirate leaned his head back against the wall, breathing in and out evenly to control the pounding headache. If they just turned their backs for a minute, he would have a nice Curaga done, completely healing himself. Kate came back, kneeling once more and pressing an ice pack to the back of his head.
"John will be here in a moment with Blair…" she muttered, and Barnes wrinkled his nose.
"I told 'im, can't be too sure it's not a machine, but he told me, 'I'm not scared of a hunk of metal.'" He grumbled. Balthier decided it would be futile to protest, and only heaved himself to his feet when a rather grizzled man, with a long scar down his eye, dressed in a military jacket, entered the room. He was followed by a girl with flowing black curls and skin browned by sun exposure. Balthier could smell on her the pungent scents of oil, dust, and engine fuel, but most importantly, he smelled the scent of the clean sky. The girl was a pilot. She danced into the room in mud-caked combat boots, but he could tell the happiness she exhibited was faked.
"Good morning, Kate, Barnes." The grizzled man, who could be no other than John Connor, nodded to them, gracing Kate with a tender kiss. "Now, Barnes tells me you're a machine. A Terminator. I want to decide for myself before jumping to conclusions. Now, do you have a name? Where are you from?"
"Balthier." The sky pirate answered. "Where I come from, I would rather not say for now. I value my secrets."
"Secrets won't get you far in the resistance, Balthier— unusual name, by the way." Connor replied, leaning against a table and crossing his arms over his chest. Not as strange or as bad as Ffamran, Balthier thought. "I'll ask you again. Where are you from?"
"Far, far away." The sky pirate replied stubbornly. "You'll only get that out of me for now. I understand you cannot trust me— but why should I trust you? All you've done is called me a machine and knocked me around with guns, after I saved your man. Hardly exemplary behavior if you're asking for boons."
Annoyance flashed over John's face, but he rearranged it into a scowl, which Balthier returned with a look of indifference. "Alright, you got me." Connor sighed. "I apologize for any harm that my men have dealt you, happy now? And now, I want you to submit to a full physical. In my presence. Can't be too careful." Balthier grimaced.
"I take it as an order?" he asked.
"It is an order." Connor replied with a straight face. Kate approached with a stethoscope and various needles and syringes on a tray. If Balthier still had a heart, it would have been tripping away at the sight of all the pointed objects the redhead had loaded onto it.
"I'm going to ask you to remove your shirt." Kate said, all business.
"Must I take off my shirt?" Balthier sighed, not ready for them to see the medallion, or the other multitude of strange things adorning his body.
"You heard the lady!" Blair chirped, punching his shoulder. The pirate did not miss the way her other hand fingered a knife at her belt. His eyes darted toward the far wall, where Fomalhaut and the Darkblade hung from a hook. His head throbbed again— no, he was not in any condition to be moving at superhuman speeds. Reluctantly, he picked at the knots holding his vest closed.
When the white shirt came off, Blair whistled at the sight of his skin. His sculpted, muscular torso was an impressive mural of scars, tattoos, and piercings. Long vines of black ink traced along his shoulder blades and down his arms, thorns, leaves, and swirls artistically placed on strategic points along the vines. It was Fran's doing— not only did the pattern look interesting, the tattoo was actually a sigil for power, a spell for storing strength or energy. A long, knotted scar stretched from his right shoulder to his left hip, a remnant from Ba'Gamnan's final battle, and a thin, white line marked the pit of his throat where he'd been shot and stabbed on more than one occasion. More scars, some from bearing full body armor, others from battles so long ago fought he could hardly remember them, decorated the rest of his back, shoulders, stomach, and chest. On his left shoulder blade, a tattooed golden eagle screamed, and a coiling black serpent, with its forked neck, hissed on his lower back. A few gold and silver piercings, some with gems, others with simple twisted designs, adorned his naval and nipples. Esper brands lined his right arm, elegant, yet gaudy in all their glory.
What caught their eyes though, was the medallion that shone from his heart cavity. "It's a machine!" Barnes roared, taking aim with his handgun, but Connor held up a hand.
"Hold your fire. Kate, continue the exam." His voice shook slightly.
The medallion, in its bed of puckered scar tissue, glinted innocently as Kate fingered her stethoscope. There was a quiet clack as she put the listener against the coin, and after a moment, she shook her head.
"Nothing. He's got no heartbeat. Just like when Barnes brought him in."
"'Cuz machines don't got hearts!" Barnes shouted. Connor turned toward his subordinate angrily.
"Barnes, if you cannot control yourself, you will be dismissed from this room." The commander snarled. Barnes grudgingly tucked his gun in his belt.
"Kate, continue." John repeated.
"Do you mind if I take some blood?" Kate asked, brandishing a syringe. "If you have any, of course."
"Not too much, darling." Balthier smiled sunnily as she eased the needle into his arm and began filling it full of blackish red liquid. Residue from the water god's spell and essence had left him with a permanent form of minor vampirism, meaning he only had to take blood every once in a while, but Fran's blood, full of eldritch magick, could last a long time. He always felt funny when he tucked her into bed after feeding— apparently his bite had some kind of venom that served as an anesthetic to relax his victim. Fran said interesting things under its influence.
Kate finished filling her syringe, and she covered the needle, returning it to the tray. Her last instrument was a scalpel. "Sorry, but the last test involves cutting into you a little to see if you really are a machine as we suspect." She said apologetically. Balthier shrugged.
"If you believe machines have as many piercings, scars, and tattoos as I do, go right ahead." He smirked as Kate grimaced.
"So barbaric!" she hissed. Balthier shrugged.
"Goes with the job, love."
She cut a thin line down his forearm, using his left as to avoid irritating the Esper brands, and examined the tiny amount of flesh exposed. No metal poked through anywhere she could see.
"He's not a machine." She concluded, and Barnes, looking very disappointed, stormed out of the room.
"Well, what are you then, Balthier? By all rights, you ought to not even be standing in front of me at the moment. You ought to be buried below the ground." Connor whispered.
"I don't know what I am. I'm just… special." The sky pirate slid his blouse back over his head, missing the look that passed over the military man's face. Something akin to regret.
"Come with me." John said eventually after a moment of deliberation. "I will tell you about the Resistance, and in turn, you will tell me about yourself."
"We have been fighting, ever since Judgment Day happened and the bombs fell." John Connor said as they walked through the icy morgue. Here, bodies were kept before being buried in the ground and given funerals. "The machines, they decided they didn't need us anymore. And so the massacre began. But we're winning, we're certainly winning. One day, we'll walk free beneath the sky again, without fear of being killed by remorseless pieces of metal."
"And you are also saying that the reason why you were suspicious of me is because Skynet has the ability to make the Terminators look completely human?" Balthier asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Yes. And I intend to show you what I mean." John Connor pressed a button, opening a sliding door. Frigid air poured over Balthier's steel shoes.
A man, or something that seemed to be a man, stood motionless inside the refrigerator, staring straight ahead blankly. However, his right hand was exposed as being completely made of metal, frost crystals coating the shining surface.
"This is a man who saved my life— Marcus Wright. He donated his heart to me when I was mortally injured, and we've kept him in hopes that we might be able to revive him, since he's mostly machine. So far, we've never had the time to do it." Connor said. Balthier nodded, turning his head slightly to focus on the sound of combat boots tapping the floor that would be too quiet for anyone else to hear.
"I told ya, we should get some of those engineers off their lazy asses and get them fixin' Marcus." Blair said, coming up behind them. John jumped, spinning to face her with a curse on his lips and a gun in his hand.
"Are you asking to be shot, Williams?" the commander asked, leaning against the door frame and closing his eyes as if asking for patience.
"Nope. Visiting Marcus, commander?" she asked, glancing toward the body in the freezer. Balthier caught the look of longing in her eyes, and wondered what Marcus meant to her.
"Yeah. I was showing Balthier what we've been up against, and also, a true friend."
"You sound like you miss him." Balthier observed.
"I do. He was a good man, saved me, Kyle Reese, Blair— all of us, on more than one occasion. If we could somehow revive him, we would. We all need him, especially now of all times." Connor sealed the door shut again. Balthier tapped his fingers on his chin, staring at the refrigerator thoughtfully.
"You say he only is missing his heart? Why does he need one?" he asked.
"He's mostly machine, but his brain is still human and needs all the maintenance of a regular brain, which means oxygenated blood."
"So you mean all he needs is a pump to move the blood through his body?" Balthier's mechanical genius was kicking into gear, solutions running through his head like electricity through a low resistance light bulb.
"Yes." John nodded, slightly unnerved by the fanatical light shining out of the pirate's eyes. "What's on your mind?"
"I can offer you a temporary solution— an external pump that would cycle his blood for him, while I work on a more permanent solution. He'll be running as if he was never down, I guarantee it." Balthier said eagerly. John messaged his forehead.
"You know what you're doing?" he asked wearily, his hand hovering over the door switch. Blair grabbed his hand and used it to press the button.
"If this is Marcus's chance, we're taking it." She said resolutely. John sighed as the door opened.
"Alright, Balthier, I'll give you a chance. I trust you with Marcus's life— give me a reason to do it."
Balthier helped Blair and John lift Marcus onto the workbench, peeling off the clothing frozen to his body. His chest had been laid open, revealing an empty, bloody cavity where his heart used to be, and frozen blood crusted the rim of all the tubes leading into the spot. Balthier examined it with a critical eye.
"It only cycles through his brain, lungs, and stomach." He mused, then looked up at John. "Got any dialysis equipment?" he asked.
"As it turns out, we do— we use it for critically injured soldiers, but I suppose we could spare one for Marcus." The leader of the Resistance agreed.
"Get him to one of those. I'll rig up something to attach it in this little heart spot here. We just have to get the blood flowing for now…"
Marcus woke up, blinking as his vision blurred and cut in and out, everything tinted a strange shade of red. Immediately, the machine in him began identifying his surroundings, bringing up files from Skynet and displaying the information in a steady stream. He was in a hospital of sorts, machinery humming loud in his auditory sensors. In a plastic chair nearby, Kyle Reese was dozing. On the other side of the bed, Blair was sitting, holding Star, Kyle's young partner in crime, in her lap. Or she had been.
"He's alive!" Blair jumped out of her chair screaming. Kyle woke up instantaneously, with a yell of terror, his eyes wild. Star stopped sucking her thumb and grabbed Marcus's mechanical hand with her chubby little one. "It worked!" Blair was whooping.
"Wait… if I'm here… is John dead? Did the heart transplant fail?" Marcus asked, his voice thin and slightly artificial sounding, but genuine panic could be heard in its inflections.
"'Course you wouldn't know— you've been out of it for a while. John Connor is as healthy as can be." Kyle grinned.
"Why am I alive now? How can I be alive now?" Marcus's eyebrows lowered in a frown of confusion.
"Well… look down." Kyle said, shifting uncomfortably in the chair. Marcus, feeling much like he had when John had chained him to a barbell and hung him inside a missile silo, looked down toward his chest.
Long tubes filled with red liquid were running out of it, attached to a large machine by the bed. That was why the humming had been so loud— they were using a dialysis machine to pump oxygenated blood throughout his body, simulating, for all purposes, a heart.
"Did you miss me this much?" he asked, staring at the lengths of tubing sticking out of his body.
"Of course! When that weird guy showed up and said he could fix you, I didn't care who he was, I just heard 'fix Marcus' and bam! Here you are!" Blair said excitedly. "I could hug you, I really could, but the guy said that the rig he made isn't particularly stable enough to be shaken around too much."
"Wait, wait, wait. Weird guy?" Marcus asked, his frown deepening. "Where'd you pick him up?"
"Barnes said that they found him in the LA Skynet Lab during a raid for supplies. He tackled a Terminator who was about to kill one of Barnes's men and shot off its head."
"He took down a Terminator." Marcus said flatly. "I'd like to meet this guy. Is he a machine?"
"No, but he's… interesting. He'll probably be by in a bit to check up on you and ask you some questions, but I heard that right now, he's working on your permanent heart so you can be up and moving without this dialysis machine." Kyle broke in. "John will be here soon as well."
Star climbed onto the bed, crouching by Marcus's legs. She made some gestures with her hands, and Marcus's computerized self instantly recognized it as American Sign Language.
Hello, she signed, a smile playing over her dark, chubby face. Marcus grinned in return.
"Hello, Star. You been keeping Kyle safe for me?" he asked. The little girl nodded, her black curls bouncing.
"Hey! I'm a good soldier!" Kyle protested. "I'm supposed to be protecting you!" Star smiled and shook her head resolutely, and the demolitions expert snorted.
Balthier hunched over the workbench, the small engine sitting motionless before him. Suspended over it on a tiny stand was a metal ring with a thin channel cut through it. This ring he now carefully etched sigils into using a very sharp knife, the blade scratching away at the metal surface. Under the engine, Balthier had carved a circular spell into a block of wood, leaves and spirals spinning off of it and into a power rune in the middle. It was the same sort of spell as the one tattooed on his back.
He was making a glossair engine from scratch. He hadn't done such a thing for almost eighty years, since he was a college student. But he had not been a protégé for nothing— the formulas were still as clear in his mind as the day he learned them.
Kyle Reese, one of Marcus's friends, walked into the room just then, carrying a few buckets of various types of oil and gasoline. "He's awake, you know. The rig worked." The man said happily, setting the buckets down and splashing volatile liquid everywhere. Balthier nodded absently, scratching another rune into the metal ring. "What's that? It looks like some kind of voodoo cult object."
"This 'voodoo cult object' will eventually become Marcus's heart." Balthier said, squinting at the symbol he'd just made. "Turn up the lights a little and bring me a tablespoon of the jet fuel, a milliliter of heavy water, and a drop of crude oil."
"What am I, your slave?" Kyle grumped, but followed the orders nonetheless. The sky pirate mixed them together and added powdered magicite he'd ground up from a chunk of magicite acquired as loot, using an eyedropper to carefully drip the liquid into the hollow channel in the ring. There— a glossair ring of sorts. All he had to do was power it up and make sure that it kept running— forever. Which was why he had also added a power storage sigil into the formula. As long as the ring spun, power would be supplied to the motor, which would pump the blood around Marcus's body. The blood in turn would turn a small turbine in one of the motor's chambers, channeling power to the tiny glossair ring. A self-powered device kept running by its own kinetic energy, of sorts.
But all of this would not work if he could not properly channel the ambient Mist into the ring. Fran would know how to do all this. Balthier thought bitterly, rubbing his hands through his hair. There was always the old way of working magick— using blood as a catalyst and what not, but he never liked losing blood, even if only a little, because he no longer had the ability to create his own. Being undead had its disadvantages. But it seemed the ancient way was now the only way.
"What is that?" Kyle was examining the glossair engine with a critical eye, taking in the slurry that threatened to spill out of the carved channel in the metal ring. "Is it dangerous?"
"Only if you add a spark." Balthier replied, unsheathing a knife from his belt and slicing open his thumb. He rubbed the liquid over the sigils in the metal, then on the wood block, saturating the runes with blood. Kyle made a face.
"Definitely voodoo." The young man said.
"If you say so." Balthier returned, touching his bloody hand to his forehead. He started gathering his energy as if preparing a Quickening, but focused instead on the tiny metal ring sitting before him. He heard Kyle gasp as Mist began to gather in a large enough quantity to become visible, occasionally flashing dim gold. The magicite in the glossair ring immediately sucked the Mist in, tiny electric sparks jumping from the ring to its housing as it began to hover.
In the meantime, Balthier could barely keep his own Mist Energy from running rampant. It was taking every ounce of his concentration to stop all of his energy from being sucked into the little glossair ring in an instant. Shaking in its housing, the ring began to revolve, slowly at first, but gaining speed. Balthier put a little more energy into the spell, and the ring began spinning so fast that a high pitched whine issued from the engine as it tried to cope with the power. The ring was glowing white and purple with energy. Finally, with a splutter, the engine kicked into life, pistons chugging. Exhausted, Balthier slumped back in his chair, tired, but pleased with his handiwork. Tapping into some of the power stored by the spell on his back, he healed the remnants of his concussion with a Curaga, ignoring Kyle's stare.
"Give me a moment, and I'll put it in Marcus's chest." Balthier said, closing his eyes and drifting into a semblance of sleep almost instantly. Kyle nodded mutely, still examining the whirring machine.
When Marcus woke up from his nap, he found he'd been disconnected from the dialysis machine, and the skin of his chest meticulously stitched together. Kyle, Blair, and Star were once again sitting by the bed, but now they'd been joined by John.
"Welcome back." The gruff man shook Marcus's hand. "How do you feel?"
"Great." Marcus smiled, just as Blair flung herself and embraced him in a hug that might have been back breaking to anyone who did not have bones and muscles made out of metal.
"Careful, Blair, or you'll ruin our scans." Kate called from a computer bay nearby. Marcus realized there were a few suction pads measuring brain activity attached to his temple, and carefully turned his head to view the monitor, where lines jumped at a consistent rate on the screen.
"So far, everything looks normal… the pump is functioning at one-hundred percent." A new voice entered his hearing range, and he looked to the other side to see another computer, this one a laptop, which had some cords running from it to some pads on his chest. The laptop was balanced on the knees of a lithe, wiry young man wearing an extravagant gold and jade green vest. This man glanced up at Marcus, a smile on his thin lips.
"You must be the strange man Blair told me Barnes picked up in the Los Angeles Skynet Lab." Marcus guessed.
"Strange man? I would hardly call myself so— exotic, perhaps. But yes, I am he. Balthier is my name." His voice was rich as velvet, a dark, silky cat's purr. He had a peculiar way of speaking, a mixture of middle and modern English.
"Balthier, huh? I take it you were a mechanic of some kind before Judgment Day?" Marcus asked, gesturing to his chest. "You've fixed me up good."
"Hardly." Balthier scoffed. "I was nowhere near when the bombs fell."
"Neither was I." Marcus agreed. "I was human to begin with, a prisoner on death row. Signed my body over to a lab, woke up here years later with no clue what had happened and a body made of metal."
"So, now you know our stories. It is time you told us yours. You don't sound like you're from here— perhaps we can help each other." John said. Balthier closed the laptop, sighing, and disconnected the wires from it. John stood in front of the door, blocking the only escape route.
"Very well. I shall tell you some of my story, though I will not bore you with the details."
"My name is Balthier— that you already know. I am… old." Balthier could not stop himself from grimacing as he said so. John raised an eyebrow.
"How old? Don't tell me you're twenty, all the kids say they're old when they're only twenty." He grinned.
"I'm ninety-seven." Balthier said shortly. Marcus whistled.
"Well now, that makes you the oldest man on this base, Grandpa!" he laughed.
"Don't call me Grandpa. I don't even have children." Balthier snapped. "My occupation is sky piracy—" He continued, but was cut off by Kyle.
"As in, 'Ar, matey, swash-swash buckle-buckle'?" Kyle asked, curling a finger like a hook.
"That would be the sea pirates. My kind fly the free… correction, mostly free skies." Balthier explained. "I did fly, until I got Warped off the face of Ivalice and into the Skynet Lab here. It's happened a lot to me— and as a result, I've acquired rather… unique characteristics. Most of them are useful; others not quite as much."
"Wait, you said you were warped here?" John asked, his eyes narrowing.
"Yes. I see the term means something to you?" the sky pirate raised an eyebrow.
"Even before I was born, Skynet has been using a time displacement device to send Terminators in an attempt to kill me before I can win the rebellion. I have been keeping tabs out for the development of such a device in our current time." John enlightened them.
"The fact that Balthier is here after being warped… you can't mean that Skynet developed a prototype time machine that intercepted him when he was supposed to be in interdimensional exile?" Kate put two and two together.
"Yes." John nodded, his hands curled into tight fists. Worry creased his brow.
"But it can't be complete yet— I mean, Skynet couldn't control when or where the machine displaced time or space. It probably meant to send a probe there, and pick it back up after seeing where it came out." Marcus reasoned.
"But it got me instead, and now the probe is wandering about in the X-zone." Balthier finished the cyborg's idea.
"Exactly. And now the time displacement machine is probably under analysis, being improved upon, and prepared for another trial. One that might be successful." John whispered. "We are behind. We are far, far behind. Kyle!" the last word was barked. The young man jumped out of his seat.
"Sir!"
"I want you to notify the men that we are now training double time. Blair, get all the techies you know on the Skynet system. I want it hacked."
"Understood!" she ran out of the room, closely followed by Kyle. Marcus began to go after her, but John stopped him.
"Marcus, you'll be with me. You and I are going to help train the elite crack team that will infiltrate Skynet."
Balthier, feeling utterly forgotten in the chaos, piped up. "You can't destroy that machine yet— what if I can use it to go home?" he asked. John paused partway through trying to make Marcus walk faster out of the hospital ward.
"Can you fight, Balthier?" he asked.
"Of course."
"Right. Come with me if you want to live." John rushed out of the room, Marcus stiffly on his heels. Balthier sighed as he trotted after them, easily keeping up with his long stride.
"… I'm already dead."
Behind him, Kate snorted.
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