AN: Just an idea I thought of, since it's never specified when Balthier and Fran met, and under what circumstances. Less romantic, and more just generic partners/bros, ha ha.
He couldn't remember his life without her, as a child in Draklor, scampering about his father's knees. The red uniform had been sewn and modified to fit him as a scientist's frock by one of the research students, and it swung inches above the floor, ragged at its hem.
"Ffamran," Cid had called, and his voice was God's to the boy of five, fresh-faced and so smart, he had built his own hover using the scraps in their building department.
Standing at stiff attention, his hair combed, Ffamran had gazed up at his father and their guest, a women, but with rabbit's ears.
Viera, he had thought, recognizing easily the species he had read about thoroughly in his twenty-four volume History of Ivalice.
"Father," he had said, and then bowed low to the Viera, a huntress, Woodwarder, from her armors and bow. "I have written to my sisters, informing them of our inability to join them on the Phon coast."
Cid nods curtly, and Ffamran swells, practically glowing in the approval of the man who re-built Archadia from its roots upwards.
"Ffamran, this is Fran," Cid gestures vaguely to his Viera companion. "She is yours, your guardian as of today. Treat her as you would me; my orders are her orders. I shall speak with you later at greater a length, son."
"Yes, sir," the boy had said, and that left the two of them alone, an Archadian child and an exiled Viera.
Silence filled the room, permeated by the hum of distant machines, of gently rocking test-tubes, the whir of airship gears. Ffamran's eyes drifted closed each night to those lullaby sounds, as much a part of him as his blood beating in his veins, his lungs filling with air.
The Viera peers downwards at him, and he feels suddenly quite small in comparison, under the scrutiny of her ruby eyes.
"You are Fran," he says, slowly.
"Yes," she replies, and her voice is like clear, cooled water. "And you are Ffamran."
"That is my name given me by my mother before her death...but it is not what I would wish you to call me, if you do not mind."
He strains in looking for expression in her face, and can nearly see the slight, subtle smile that graces her features.
"I do not mind, Son of Bunansa."
Ffamran tugs at his frock. "My name is Balthier, as I have chosen it. What do you think?"
Fran tilts her heard to one side, and nods slowly.
"It is so. You seem a Balthier to my view."
"Well, of course I do. It is why I chose it as my name. What are you supposed to do, when you are my guardian? I do not think I need protection."
"Your father wishes it so."
"I do not agree with him," Balthier admits, shyly, turning on his heel and beginning the long stroll back to his chambers on the 21st floor. Fran follows behind, only a second or so, and he feels a strange thing, as they walk down the hall together towards the lift. It is a settling in his gut, and a quieting of his mind, so that it is as if the Viera had always been there, a step to his back.
"But you will do as he says, for he is your Father. It is the way of Humes"
"Not always," he argues. "Many times House Solidor and its branches have experienced uprisings and battles between sons and fathers. But you are right; I obey my father. You stay as Guardian of Balthier, but..."
They enter the lift, and he enters the series of codes required for unlocking access to his floor. The doors slide shut with a whisper, and in the recycled air-space, he murmurs words he will never forget:
"But we are secretly Partners, Fran. Companions, for life. Do you agree?"
And he knows it is bold, to force anyone, let alone a Viera, to make a pact such as this, but he has not ever had a companion before, confined as he is to the cold halls of science. So he asks, and to his youthful surprise, she takes his hand in his, warm, and whispers:
"I do agree, Balthier."
"You would become a Judge, then?"
Fran sits at the desk chair in his quarters, which have expanded to include the entirety of the 21st floor, given to him as a present on his 13th naming day. They sit in the library, Balthier splayed across his favorite armchair, a deep maroon color. A hologram runs information in scrawling texts across the screen, in Archadian and Old Archadian, in the Seeq language and in Moogle shorthand, as per the Prodigal son's programming it so. It reads:
"Bunansa son to accept position as Judge..." and so on.
The so-called son has grown, dressing in expensive Archadian fashion, his hair grown to his shoulders and falling in his eyes.
Balthier breathes loudly, exhaling in that exasperated way the adolescent Humes do, when they are feeling arrogant or misunderstood. Fran does not understand him, truthfully, but she misunderstands him less than anyone else in all of Ivalice, and this counts for everything.
"Balthier, you may speak your mind in my prescence. Has it not been so these years?"
But he remains silent for a long while, a time that Fran waits through patiently, for she has waited nearly thirty years to find a Hume as him, who makes her decision to leave the Wood worth everything.
"Why do you speak with that Researcher of Aerodynamics with such familiarity?" is what he finally asks, standing up and scaling one of the many ladders to search a high-up bookshelf. Fran watches him warily, always frightened he may fall, though he is now 14, and capable enough.
"Marche?"
"Yes," he says, and then whispers venomously, as if she could not hear: "You know his name."
"I share his passion for airships, as do you, would you to speak with him, Balthier. It is not what you seem to imply."
"And what do I seem to imply?"
The Bunansa Son turns his head to her, for once looking down to her, not dwarfed in her company. His green eyes are cold, full of jealousy she has never seen, and Fran feels something twist at her insides.
And the Viera and Hume gaze at one another, across a thousand seas of distance.
Once, when he was a boy, he would tell her everything, he would talk and talk and talk until the sun left the sky and she bade him goodnight til morning. Once, he swore they were close as blood, ten years old and already a whisper of the man he would become one day.
Now their time is filled with silences and his temper, and Cid, always his father to whom nothing is good enough.
"That we are involved, romantically," Fran answers. "He is a boy to me, as are you."
At this, Balthier falls quiet again, returning to his search.
A few seconds, then: "Why are you becoming a Judge?"
"Cid would have it so. He has dreamed of this for one of his sons for many years; my brothers were not cut of the cloth of Bunansa and had too much of my mother within them. So they were soldiers without rank, now graves in our family's plot. Victims of this war."
"That does not explain anything."
He jumps from the ladder. "Do I have to explain everything? Why must I have reason to be a Judge? Can I not simply want to do it?"
Fran balks, protests: "You never mentioned it before now. Before this moment, it was only a wish of Cid's. It is not your wish...I thought..."
"Thought that we would be sky-pirates, like I said when I was six? Fran, you are old but you have not grown up. That is a child's dream. I must be practical."
"It is not what you want..."
Balthier's face screws up with anger. "You know nothing of what I want! You have no idea!"
Fran stands up, full of unaccustomed fury, a strange thing nearly foreign to her. She rarely feels anger, far too patient and intuitive, less expectant and thus never disappointed.
But now she is angry beyond thought, and Balthier seems to realize his mistake, already fumbling for words with an apology written in his face. She blusters past him, into the corridor and to the lift, walking as fast as she can...
"Fran, wait, no, I do not mean---please, Fran!"
Fran turns in front of the elevator doors, and tells him: "You have outgrown me, Balthier. I find myself for want of a new profession...You shall make a fine Judge."
This is where she leaves him, the first time, hurt and guilty and still mad, a boy-yet-a-man, with a starched collar and too-long hair.
The three-pronged helmet of a High Judge rests in his lap, the symbol of rank second only to Judge Magister. Balthier is seventeen, alone in a small encampment in the Estersand with only the arriving company of a Rozzarian diplomat and his party to comfort him.
He should not think of himself as alone, not entirely, for there are his soliders, resentful to be commandeered by a mere boy, and his stable runner, who cares for the chocobos.
A shadow on his tent indicates a message; staring into the empty sockets of his helm for a second more, he then lifts it onto his head, and turns to face the entrance.
"You may enter."
"Sir, the Rozzarian diplomat has sent his hired guard ahead to greet us and inform us of his whereabouts in relation to his arrival."
"Send them in."
The shadow on the canvas of his quarters should have been enough, and so it was, for when the silhouette of a Viera, with the ears and longbow appeared, he felt his heart wrench at the loss of Fran, only to find it increase tenfold to see her enter, and kneel before him.
"Judge Bunansa," she mutters, eyes averted to the ground.
"Leave us," Balthier commands the soldier, who obeys, and as soon as he is disappeared, he tears off his Judge's helmet as quickly as he put it on, getting down upon his knees to embrace her. She stiffens in his touch, perhaps because of the armor, but more than likely because of their parting.
"Forgive me, forgive me, I knew not what I did," he whispers, over and over and over, tears suddenly coming that he had not known he had been holding, and it is then that she takes him in her arms, silent as always.
She sees him every month, bringing him tidings of the world outside, until the day of his eighteenth naming day, when he folds his Judge's crimson cape, lays his helm atop it, and leaves Archadia forever.
They fly now, pirates and partners, as they had always vowed, and there are times when Balthier turns to her, the wind whipping his hair...he feels that settling as he had before, looking into her eyes, only now he knows what it is: it is feeling at Home.