Author's Note: I have decided to just keep this story open as a place to put ficlets as I feel like writing them. I intend to stick with a general theme centered on Cid and Balthier and their relationships. As always, reviews are appreciated. :) Many thanks for reading!
Balthier was scornful of many things. Archadian bureaucracy, Rozzarian airship design, and Dalmascan outerwear were but a few of the subjects that earned a sneer and a brush-off from him. With such selective taste as the pirate was imbued with, it was little wonder that he chose a life without landing or loyalty to any colors. Balthier was a man free to judge as he willed, arms crossed and one cocky eyebrow raised. It was a privilege he fought dearly for, sacrificing all that he had been raised to know, and perhaps, love. He was glad of it. His scorn was well paid for, and nothing caused it to run deeper than those who lived in regret.
He was surrounded by regret, it seemed. These people had it in spades. Vaan and Penelo regretted the loss of their families, the loss of the lives they knew to the ambition of the Empire. However, they were young, and that was powerful medicine. Each day they leaped forward to embrace it anew, and Balthier could see that regret could never hold them long. He often wondered how they stayed so buoyant when his own soul had been already hollow at their age.
The princess had regrets in plenty; her poor dead father, her poor dead prince, her poor dead kingdom. Balthier would have scorned her as well, if it were not for the passion with which she fought those specters. He recognized that fight, knew it blow for blow. She too deplored feelings that bound one so tightly to the past, though she was far more susceptible to them than Balthier knew himself to be. She would have lost her war, the pirate knew, if he hadn't taken her ring, cut her ties.
The captain, the once "Kingslayer," was swamped with regret. Balthier often wondered how Basch didn't drown under the sheer weight of his failures. It was his honor that upheld him, but Balthier couldn't fathom the concept: honor was just another chain in the shadows of his past. Basch survived somehow, but Balthier hated sharing a watch with him at night, when the waves of regret flowed from him unceasingly in the dark.
Even Fran, ethereal Fran, who stood above most emotions as if they were unworthy of a place in her heart; even she knew regret. Balthier would even argue that she understood it better than a Hume ever could. Yet she prevailed. Fran was his bastion, a glowing pillar against choking regrets. He walked with her; he too pushed aside regret completely in order to embrace the skies… or so he believed.
Damn the day he stepped foot in Archades, the hour he tread the halls he walked as a boy, and later, when he was no longer a boy, but less than a man. Curse that jovial face, the knowing smirk and glint of mad genius in the old man's eyes. Balthier spent every night after that unwanted reunion reliving the reasons he left, falling asleep counting not sheep, but the numerous crimes Dr. Cid had committed against his only son. Balthier knew, each time he spoke that litany in the privacy of his mind, that his path had been right; he had always been right. He had earned this freedom, and he could judge how he wished, without regret. Without regret, the pirate could face the one from whom he had run.
He smirked and swaggered, full of scorn, and acted as if he cared not. He stood and watched the old man fall, and he felt initially relieved, as he knew we would. Righteous, victorious; Balthier would have named those as well. It was done, the final payment for his freedom. It was all he had ever wanted.
Yet, as the night fell and the pirate sat alone, shadows plucking at the threads of his clothes and the light that had been so bright dissolving into nothing, Balthier felt nothing of those feelings. He felt nothing but regret, and he hated himself for it.