Chapter Thirty-Six: Supporting Players take their bow
A/N: This is it -the end is nigh, only two chapters left. Reviews always appreciated.
'Can we fly?'
' There is no power to the Glossair rings.'
Fran's hands ghosted over the console, but the monitors told true. The Strahl would not be flying.
' Look!' Ashe cried from behind them.
' Bahamut's glossair rings are stopping!'
A lightening fast look exchanged between Fran and her hume partner. A decision made in one mind instantly communicated to the other so that it seemed instead that the one thought joined the two minds.
' Vaan, take the Strahl. As soon as there's power go. Fran with me.'
Balthier, the spark of conviction in his serious eyes, relinquished the Strahl to Vaan, just as he predicted he may need to on the Ridorana Cataract.
Fran swiftly called her own apprentice to her, gently instructing a frightened but determined Penelo on her role before following Balthier out of the Strahl and back into the falling Bahamut.
Within the corridors of Bahamut, thick with the acrid smoke of burning Mist fuel and cordite, chaos reigned.
' You would think,' Balthier complained coolly as he and Fran were forced to press against opposing walls to allow a panicked gaggle of Imperials to pass.
' That military training would teach these tin soldiers better discipline.'
' They fear imminent death.' Fran murmured dryly.
Balthier snorted, ' Death is hardly imminent. I think we turn left here.' He nodded to a particularly smoke clogged corridor.
' It surprises me that the soliders do not better understand the structural integrity of this Fortress, even if she crashes only the lowest levels will be destroyed, her tower should remain strong.'
Fran conceded as she watched the Humes, stinking of metal and terror, collapse into their own panic.
Balthier nodded as they pushed their way through a thickening stream of stampeding imperials, which ignored the two pirates with the single-mindedness of a stream diverting around two rocks.
' An ignorance in basic airship engineering we can use to our advantage. This strikes me as the prime dramatic moment for two pirates to take flight.'
Fran almost smiled, ' Does the plight of Rabanastre not factor in your thoughts Balthier?'
They had reached the power core of the Fortress, reaching upwards to the collapsing deck where they had fought Vayne and all the way down to the docking bays of the Fortress.
' I resent the implication Fran, as if I would stand by and watch all our hard work be for nought as Rabanastre is crushed by a falling sky fortress.'
' Fortune favours us today, then, to allow the Leading Man his greatest hour and an equally convenient foil for escape.' Fran suggested dryly.
Balthier, looking up from his thoughtful surveyance of the power relays and conduit towers making up the power core, turned and flashed Fran a grin.
'Quite. Now, to work.' He gestured to the main engineering relay.
' Our usual arrangement? You take the heavy lifting and I'll do the fine tuning?'
Fran nodded, 'Agreed.'
They worked in companionable silence back to back each working to their own strengths.
Fran worked on replacing and removing damaged parts from the main power core while Balthier concentrated on circumventing power relays and venting excess Mist to get power to the Glossair rings.
Balthier stopped briefly in his work to tune in a communication relay to pick up on the Strahl's communication channel.
The scratchy bursts of static slowly resolved themselves into recognisable voices.
'This is Judge Magister Zaagabaath of the Imperial Cruiser Alexander. The Bahamut cannot be allowed to destroy Rabanastre, call back your troops; the Alexander prepares to ram her.'
Fran heard Balthier's soft curse, more annoyance than worry. Fran did not stop in her work, The Alexander was a powerful vessel but Fran wondered if it could do much damage to the Bahamut.
Despite the great damage already wrought upon the Bahamut's interior and exterior Fran's trained mechanics eye saw that structurally she held firm.
Balthier had been fiddling with the communication relay so that he could leap-frog the Strahl's transmission wave and communicate with the ships.
' Hasty isn't he?'
Balthier drawled, more to Fran than to anyone else who might receive the transmission.
Balthier had turned back to silently question her progress with a raised eyebrow. Fran gestured with a grease slicked hand, she was almost there.
' Balthier!' Vaan's voice crackled over the communication relay and Fran smiled ever so slightly as she worked; the Strahl and its occupants where safe.
' Ah, Vaan, you got the Strahl away safe, then?' Balthier echoed her sentiment. 'The Strahls a fine airship isn't she?'
' Stop that fool of a Judge, would you? I've almost got the rings up and flying.'
' Balthier!' Ashe's voice, static emphasising the strident tone to ear drum piercing intensity, 'Do you know what you are doing?'
Fran, distracted both by her work and by the conversation Balthier blithely continued as he finished his recalibrations, did not hear the piece of metal girder fall from above her until it was too late.
Pain lanced through her body and Fran could not move from under the red, hot, smoking girder that pinned her to the ground.
Try as she might she could not reach the power relay to finish her repairs either.
Without the last few cogs that needed replacing the Bahamut would be unflyable, the Glossair rings might be operational but they would be of no use if navigation and inertia dampeners were inoperative.
Fran strained her reaching hand, the one not trapped under her inert body but even her reach could not breach the distance. Fran lifted her head, trying to find voice to warn Balthier.
'Princess have you forgotten my role in this story, I am the Leading Man.'
Balthier's voice filled her ears, and she strained ebbing consciousness to catch its smooth flow.
He was as nonchalantly flippant as only he could be.
As only a man who has spent the last six years living a lie within his very soul, a man who would become a fiction so as to avoid his own broken reality; could be.
Fran could not hold onto that voice, as sweet and enticing as it was, as greyness eroded senses.
She felt through a body shuddering into shock, the thrum of power restored to the Glossair rings.
'Must I do everything?'
Fran was jolted back to consciousness as the pressing weight of the girder was lifted from her; she caught the scent of burning flesh as Balthier struggled with the red hot steel with bare hands.
Dropping down beside her Fran only took note of the physical reality of her injuries when she saw the facetious nonchalance that Balthier would wear upon his face when his own death came, falter to look upon her.
The shattered end of femur protruded from the split flesh of her right leg, the skin around the wound blackened and crisp with burns, Fran drew a breath of pain as Balthier struggled with burned hands to lift her in his arms.
Yet when she was secure within the cradle of his arms, as strong it suddenly seemed as the boughs of Golmore's oldest tree, Fran found her pain melted away.
Around them the Bahamut appeared intent on shaking itself apart in fire and anguish, yet for just one moment this mattered not to Fran.
All she felt was an all-encompassing sense of peace. Her words to him, perhaps her last for a time, were spoken from a heart that had relished every moment of entertainment he had brought to her life lead in exile from purpose.
' I see you more in a supporting role.'
Fran whispered as she let her head drop to his shoulder and surrendered herself to unconsciousness. They would not die this day, she knew, for they had too much to live for.
' Fran please.'
Balthier's chiding, came to her as blackness enveloped her senses, on a wave of concern and affection that she knew she had heard many times before from him.
Fran felt herself smile as her departing consciousness floated in the Mist rich air above both their heads.
In her flying companion's arms Fran felt for the first time in fifty years at home and secure.
Free birds would ever flock together; come what may.