Doctor Cid might have been half-crazed and starved for control and power, and his mind might have been addled by the Nethicite held soundly in his hands, but his words rang horribly true in her ears, like a conscience that she had been avoiding for a long time and simply couldn’t tune out any longer. When the scientist had departed, off into the sky to make for Giruvegan, she had felt nothing but hollowness in her bones and chaos in her mind, a sensation she could neither sort or shake, and she remained silent for the journey to Balfonheim Port.
The port itself was a lively place, full of energy and, strange enough, an aura of optimism in the midst of war, and while Ashe knew the citizens of the docks were pirates and thieves, she couldn’t bring herself to condemn them for it any longer. Who was she to judge and throw stones, when she herself craved the power of the Nethicite she knew to be dangerous and corrupted? Her own comrades had muddled pasts of thievery and pirating, and she valued their companionship and, dare she say it, friendship, more than anything else she had.
But she was too shaken by the doctor’s words to enjoy the scenery like the others, and didn’t answer when Vaan asked her excitedly if she thought he might pick up some tips on becoming a sky pirate amongst the rogues. She crossed her arms over her chest and listened silently while Reddas told them about the Feywood, and the hidden path to Giruvegan, and she wasn’t even frightened to learn of the gathering of the Mist, which she knew from past experience to be an unstable force to bargain with.
“Talk to my men to learn more about the Feywood,” Reddas told the party, and Vaan ran out the large double doors immediately, babbling on about setting sail as soon as he could get his rather unskilled hands on the controls.
“Your apprentice is more pirate than you,” Reddas laughed while Balthier simmered and left angrily, perhaps reacting stronger than he should have. Ashe watched him go and wished to follow, but the bald pirate held her back with his words.
“Do you crave the Nethicite?” he asked, and it was all too much, all too soon. Cid’s words, and the echoes of Raithwall’s tomb, and even the Sword of Kings which she held strapped to her back like a child, they all began to ring inside her head like a chorus of voices she couldn’t discern or interpret. She could feel the Nethicite pulling at her, like the Dawn Shard had before its light had been exterminated, and it was too strong for her to fight against in her current state.
“Yes,” she whispered, feeling like a fool and a traitor for uttering the word. “I seek its power. But I also fear it.”
Reddas studied her shrewdly, and his gaze felt like hot sunlight on her face, causing her cheeks to flare and flush, and she found it impossible to meet his eyes. He knew, as did many of the others, that what she sought after wasn’t the true way she needed to deal with the threat, but her party had never raised a voice to sway her, and she was afraid that if the pirate standing before her did, her resolve would crack.
“It is wise to do so,” he said finally, and she let out a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding, feeling as if she had passed some sort of hidden trial. “I can only tell you to remember Nabudis.”
“Nabudis,” she said, drawing air in sharply. Nabudis was simply another memory that she simply couldn’t fit into her mind, she couldn’t afford to dwell upon the past when she could do nothing to change it, but she knew why he brought it up, and it was a wise counsel.
She turned and made to leave the room, her hands clasped in front of her form, when he called out once more and stopped her in her tracks.
“He will follow you,” the pirate said, staring off over the railing of the ship at the vast ocean beyond, the muscles in his arms rippling as he crossed his hands over his chest. He cut a formidable form standing there, chin held high, master of his domain, but Ashe couldn’t answer due to the strange lump that had formed in her throat, stifling her.
When she didn’t answer, he appeared to forget her presence, and while she pondered the meaning of his words she didn’t especially want them explained, and it was a strange paradox that she lost herself in, wandering through the streets as she tried to find the others. She decided after some length that they had found one of the local vendors and were restocking on supplies, perhaps even investing in new weapons, but their whereabouts were as much a mystery to her as the placements of the markets on the street corners.
She found herself alone on the streets, moving aside to the sailors and hired hands that walked quickly past her, trying her best not to look like a lost tourist.
A moogle brushed past her calves and startled her so badly that she nearly fell, but there was a hand on her arm to catch her, and she found herself looking at an attractive, buxom woman with high cheekbones and golden curls of hair.
“Watch yourself,” the other woman said with a slight sneer, letting go of Ashe’s elbow. “This isn’t a good town to get lost in.”
“I had gathered that,” Ashe responded in kind, eager to get away from the over-bearing woman and find her companions. She thought she would until the figure behind reached out and grabbed her arm once more, the woman’s fingernails digging rather sharply into Ashe’s skin.
“You’re that girl that came in with Reddas,” the pirate woman said with a disapproving stare. “The princess.”
She spat out the title with such venom that Ashe wondered how many other princesses had crossed her path and had done her wrong in some way, or if she simply had an aversion to royalty in general. She wished to snatch her arm away, but the nails were scratching painfully, and she was afraid of what the pirate would do should she twist her arm out of her grasp.
“I did,” Ashe said as confidently as she could, meeting the woman’s gaze. “He assisted us in an earlier skirmish.”
“The only reason Reddas helped you, princess, was because you are traveling with Balthier,” the pirate woman said with an audible sneer, finally dropping Ashe’s arm, and Ashe almost wanted to examine it and check for half-moon shaped marks on her skin.
“What should it matter why he aided us?” Ashe asked, drawing herself up to her full height and wishing fervently that one of her comrades would show up with the news that they were leaving shortly.
“I just think it’s interesting,” the other woman said, and her expression changed quite suddenly from suspicious to sultry, her dark lips pursing up. “Balthier and I go way back.”
At a loss for words, Ashe watched the woman turn and make her way back towards Reddas’ airship, docked near one of the large buildings sporting a striped awning over the front door, and she couldn’t stop the increased pounding of her heartbeat nor the clenching of her fists at her side. She stood there for a long time before finally willing her feet to move, making her way down one of the side streets in hopes of coming across the sundries vendor she knew had to be somewhere in the port, questioning why, in the midst of everything, she was unable to think of anything but the pirate woman’s last statement.
She found the goods vendor inside a small, sweltering shop, and elected to sit outside for her comrades to exit, finding a seat atop a pile of crates that seemed a bit sticky from an earlier transport. She let her head drop down into her hands, overcome with exhaustion, and did not notice when there were footsteps echoing around her.
“We wondered where you went off to,” Penelo said, her voice light and cheery, and Ashe looked up to find the group standing around her. Fran was sorting the newest acquisitions into her bag, and Basch was talking with a pirate lingering nearby, and Balthier was, amazingly enough, nowhere in sight.
“Are we prepared to leave?” Ashe asked, wishing to be rid of the port and everything it held as soon as possible, hoping that the journey through the Feywood would clear her mind of Doctor Cid’s insightful comments and the horrible memories of Nabudis. Penelo nodded, but it took several minutes before the party had settled enough to leave, and Basch looked around, appearing agitated.
“Where has he gone?” the Knight growled, obviously questioning the missing pirate’s location. “We can’t leave without him.”
“I told him that we would,” Vaan sighed, looking as if he wished his threat could be carried out as promised. The group resigned themselves for waiting for their missing member to show up, and it ended up being many long minutes that passed until Balthier finally strode up beside them, clapping a hand on Basch’s shoulder.
“Shall we be off then?” he asked, sounding far too cheerful to have just delayed the group’s departure from the town. Basch seemed annoyed but said nothing, and they made their way towards the end of the long street, littered with vendors and merchants haggling customers, their footsteps lost amongst the noise that perpetually dominated the docks, until they had reached the Aerodrome entrance, marked with large, doubled arches.
Ashe willed herself to keep her gaze only on the street in front of her feet, because if she let it stray elsewhere, she was afraid of what it might bring. As her luck would have it, given that she had none at the current moment, Balthier seemed keen to strike up a conversation with her as they entered the covered structure, falling into step next to her behind the others.
“You are doing an excellent job of shunning me,” he mused, though he didn’t seem alarmed by it. Ashe hardened her face as best she could and continued walking, forcing her steps to turn into a march that she counted out within her head to keep her attention focused elsewhere. Her arms were stiff and her fists were balled, but she had forgotten about the marks her earlier encounter had left on her skin, and the pirate was, unfortunately enough, shrewd enough to pick them out.
“What on earth happened to you?” he inquired, grabbing her arm and holding it still while he examined the crescent-shaped indents in her flesh. Ashe snatched her arm away as quickly as she could, glaring at him.
“I ran into an old acquaintance of yours,” she hissed, keeping her voice low as not to alert the others, who were, thankfully, already inside the shadows of the dome.
“An acquaintance sporting a taste for violence, by the look of things,” he frowned. “What was the name?”
“I wasn’t privileged to it,” Ashe replied haughtily, “but I’m sure you would know her much better from her rather voluptuous physique than her name anyhow.”
She whipped around with a twist of her heel and fully intended to have the last word in the matter, but the pirate, who never quite understood the meaning of her huffing and turning, followed after her up the steps and into the shadows, where he pulled her aside almost roughly and stopped her advance towards the group’s transportation.
“Did she hurt you anywhere else?” he demanded, and his face was pressed rather close to her. It was making it difficult for her to think clearly, and she wished to be coherent, for she had a very grand dramatic exit planned and he was making it hard to focus on the words she had planned. She twisted in his grasp, and while she assumed that her squirming would be enough to loosen his grip, it only tightened.
“No,” she finally admitted, “but the fact that you know who I’m talking of speaks volumes.”
Balthier did release her then, and she pulled away, knowing her cheeks were flushed and suddenly fiercely glad for the shadows of the building, which kept most of her form in the indistinguishable darkness of the corners.
“Is that what held you up?” Ashe asked, aware that she should probably cease talking while she was ahead and unable to stop herself from plunging on anyway. “Were you making time for one last rendezvous?”
The shadows, that she had only moments earlier been praising, were now working against her as they made it difficult to read the expression flickering across his features. She couldn’t decipher what it was, and by the prolonged silence she was afraid that she had said something out of line, perhaps pushed him too far.
“You shouldn’t hold the group up due to selfish, personal matters,” she said, drawing herself up as straight as she could and lifting her chin, hoping that by changing the subject and shifting the weight to the group, she could deflect whatever outburst was to follow. It was several more tense moments before he replied.
“Why does it bother you to think of who I consort with?” he asked, and to her surprise, he didn’t sound angry, but bemused, and she couldn’t decide if the apparent switch of emotion was to her benefit or not.
“You are in the company of royalty now,” she responded, furiously throwing out the first thing that came to mind in her blind panic. “What you do reflects on me, and on all of us, and I won’t have you ruining my reputation.”
“Princess, you are dead to the world,” he said, taking a step towards her so that his face was completely lost amidst the shadows. “What manner of reputation do you speak of?”
She had no answer, and she glared down at the ground, wishing that the others would wonder what the delay was and come back to find them, wishing that Reddas had not kept her on the airship longer than the others, wishing that her path was clear and Cid hadn’t rattled her so with his awfully astute comments, and more than anything else, wishing that her world no longer became hazy whenever he was near so that she could no longer make out thoughts or feelings, but could only feel the pounding of her blood in her chest and head.
There was a pregnant pause, and the anxiety of not knowing what was going on in the situation was making her breath hitch painfully in her throat, and then Balthier took another step forward, so that he was standing quite near to her, and leaned his head down so his chin hovered just over her shoulder.
“She means nothing to me,” he said, and Ashe could have sworn she heard the grin in his tone. “And I was speaking with Reddas to acquire some directions.”
It felt as if a weight was lifted off her back, but her heart was still pounding almost frighteningly fast, and she took a long, shaky breath to attempt to compose herself before answering.
“Very well,” she answered, knowing full well that her façade was fooling no one, and yet unable to give it up just yet. There was a knot in the base of her stomach, not unlike the one she had carried for two years while dwelling in the sewers of her own city, the sort of knot that carried worry and anxiety and fear of the unknown. While that twisting had been one of grief and anguish, this was full of something else, something she couldn’t quite name but was sure that, eventually, she would come to understand.
Balthier finally stepped away, and she could think again, and she turned without another word and made her way towards the others, who failed to seem troubled by the prolonged absence, and she willed herself to stop trembling, though she wasn’t entirely sure if it was a battle she won.
“Are we ready to depart?” she asked the party when she reached their sides, and Vaan leapt to his feet, eager to take to the skies. Balthier stayed behind her as they went over the final preparations, but she could have sworn that while she wasn’t looking at him, purposefully, of course, he was smiling at her. |
