A/N - Exams are over:)
Poetry
Balthier is tired. He is not sure whether his lamp is flickering or he keeps falling asleep in snatches, waking up just before his head hits the desk. Either way, this makes it difficult for him to see the heavily annotated document before him, barely readable through ink-stained fingerprints and smudges of frustration.
Perhaps he should go to sleep. After all, he will need to be in top piloting form tomorrow. Ah. but tomorrow may be too late, he thinks to himself. Galvanized, he puts pen to paper once again and makes a few illegible scribbles. It is a rough draft of course, so there is no need to employ the elegant Archadian whorls and curlicues that hint at his aristocratic upbringing. In fact, there is rarely any need for it, except that it is important for this piece to be well-received.
Scowling, he remembers the events of the day, a day that began in the jungle and led to a small and hidden village named Eruyt...
"Be cautious. The wood is jealous of the humes who have taken you..."
Balthier hears Jote's words to Fran despite his distance. It was likely that the viera had deliberately pitched her voice for hume listeners, for all the good that it would do. Long ago, Fran had cut herself from the Wood, and now its desires were as nothing to her. Or so she often said. Jote seems to read something in the sudden stillness of his partner, and Balthier knows at once that Fran is taken aback, and is now listening – truly listening.
Jote lowers her voice so the humes can no longer hear. She does not know that Balthier has sharp eyesight, and possesses the skill to read lips.
"What I mean to say is, the hume who has taken you. You know the one," she says quietly.
Of course Fran knows the one.
"I have never met this pirate before, and yet, seeing you with him...I am no fool, sister," Jote continues.
"Nor am I. My own counsel I keep," Fran says, a little too quickly. Balthier gauges this as defensiveness, though why he is sensing it in someone so calm and self-possessed, he does not know.
Fran walks away from the encounter as tense as a taut bowstring, every movement calculated for the appearance of normality, yet somehow lacking the natural grace that usually defined her.
"How old are you again?" The boy, Vaan, how he could have hit him in that moment! Yet, conversely, the thoughtless question served to dispel the building tension Balthier could see in Fran's knotted shoulders. Yes, hiding behind vanity and wounded pride, the viera was...highly amused.
Since then, Balthier has been thinking. Thoughts of the desperate quest of their party have been shoved inconsequentially to the back of his mind, and in the moment that extreme fatigue overbalanced reason he decided to write his leading lady a poem. In a more lucid moments, Balthier would know perfectly well that Fran does not appreciate the empty, flowery rhetoric she believes poetry to be, but this is not one of those moments.
There is a soft knock on the door. It's Fran.
"You are not asleep."
Balthier is not sure whether this is a statement or question, so he just shakes his head.
"You worry over something."
Fran comes to sit on the edge of the desk. "Will you tell me?" she asks, and he hears the faint note of concern in her voice.
"Fran. She spoke of a hume who had taken you away...but I think you are the one who has taken me..." Balthier hears himself saying.
There is a silence.
"You are tired, Balthier. You must sleep," she says haltingly.
"Will you return to the woods as I sleep?" he asks, irreverent poetry quite forgotten.
Balthier allows himself to be guided to his bed. He is surprised when Fran lies down beside him.
"My sister...she had the truth of it. And a sky pirate does not relinquish that which he has stolen so easily," she murmurs in his ear.
Balthier does not answer. He has fallen asleep, his arm around her shoulders.