Note: So, I only played through FFXII recently, and was completely blown away! What a good game. Anyways, these are just one-shots and various, unrelated stories about Balthier and Fran...because they're amazing. I don't own Final Fantasy.
They fall from the Bahumut in the wake of the flames, streaming towards the earth. Balthier is a few feet above her, having pushed her out first (always a gentleman, roughly), his limbs flailing in all directions, hands scrabbling to reach her, to hold her.
Fran is not sure why, but the sight offers her a pang of nostalgia: of a younger Balthier, gangly and not yet grown into his adult body, all long-limbed and false confidences. Of his smile, as he would run along ancient stone walls, leap across pits of fire or vats or who knows what chemical, brave countless gunfights against soldiers, beasts, anything. She remembers lingering, always behind, her heart surging with a foreign emotion, her head suddenly, momentarily dizzy with worry. It was not that Fran could not keep up with her Hume partner, rather that, some instinctual part of her had known, always, from the beginning, to take the rear. Just in case.
Years have taken those early months of panic away from her, but every so often, she feels a brief rush of concern, seeing him dodge a killing blow, or pick a fight with a particularly irritable Bangaa. Instead, the feeling is replaced with easiness, of a perfect synchronicity she's never felt before; the incline of their heads, the small smirk that plays across his lips, and, parallel, on hers.
So now they are falling, and Fran finally concedes, ever patient, spreading her arms to slow her own fall so that Balthier can careen towards her, into her, his hands going to her waist as if they have been there forever. He presses his face into her neck.
"We are not going to die," he tells her, over the roar of explosions and the cleaving of metal.
"No," she answers back, that warmth in her chest spreading to tingle her fingers, her toes. Fran loops her own arms about his neck.
"What was that look for, anyways?"
If it had been another time, when they were not falling from the sky, Fran would have answered cryptically, but she blurts out:
"I was simply thinking how you worry me so that I cannot stand it, and how it is a shame since I shan't ever leave you, I will perhaps be going to an early grave due to all the fretting you cause me."
Her manner of speaking always seems to move him, half-amused and half-rapt, his eyes positively glowing as he lifts his head and kisses her suddenly, quickly, moving away to whisper, breathlessly:
"I love you."
Having thought her previous statement and his not-yet-uttered response to be the closest either of them would come to confessing such things, Fran is stunned. Balthier, apparently, feels the same, his cheeks flushed, hair rushing like summer grass about his head, his earrings waggling in the wind.
"I love you," she tells him back, reassures him, and she wonders if they would say this if they were not almost-going-to-die. Not dying. She cannot admit to that.
And so they fall, faster and faster, to the ground.
The sand whispers in the summer breeze, tickling Fran's nose. The Strahl is not a few yards away, along a remote part of the shore, its shade creeping ever closer to her sun-bathing spot as the day passes. After the chaos of it all, her partner had wisely suggested they lay low for a month or so, a vacation of sorts, away from sky-pirating and kingdom-saving. Fran is inclined to agree, and here they are, Balthier's cheek is pressing somewhat uncomfortably against her shoulder, his soft breathing a song in her ear. A bird passes overhead, and he stirs, eyes fluttering open.
"Fran," he murmurs, as if barely believing it, his collar mussed and his torso bandaged painstakingly.
"Balthier," she replies, their smiles identically irrepressible as the sun shines overhead.