Chapter Text
The trip to Nalbina is uncomfortable for a myriad of reasons.
First and foremost is the heat. Balthier knows, intimately, that Imperial airships have a judicious cooling system, all the better to keep judges from roasting within their ridiculous armor. Prison transports do not appear to share the same system.
There is sweat rolling down his spine; Fran’s exposed flesh shines with it, even in the dim lighting. The air is rank with their accumulated odor. Not a hint of a breeze stirs in their tiny transport cell.
The cell has clearly only been designed to hold a single occupant, and perhaps not even that, if the prisoner were to be a particularly round seeq. They are all three rather svelte, and yet there is naught he can do to keep from touching his unfortunate cellmates.
He is crushed against Fran, the churl sprawled unconscious across both their laps.
Which is another reason the trip is intolerable.
He’s given his word to a sobbing maid that Vaan would be returned. He did not specify that it would be in one piece, but it had certainly been implied.
“Any news?” he asks.
Fran flicks an ear at him in obvious irritation. “If there were news,” she says, acidly, “I would have shared, if only to quiet your fretting.” Her manacled wrists rest on Vaan’s chest, fingers awkwardly crooked so they touch flesh.
Healing magicks unfurl from her hands, spreading white light against bare skin. Vaan does not stir under the barrage of spell work, eyes ringed in dark bruises, clear fluid smeared across his cheeks.
Balthier has never seen Fran so pale as when the fluid had begun to leak from the churl’s ears and nostrils.
Vaan initially had seemed only slightly dazed after the blow to the head. It hadn’t taken him long to regain his feet, though the Imperial officer had felt the need to chivvy him along before finally hooking a cruel hand between the churl’s manacles and tugging fit to bruise.
He had been awake, if moderately more incomprehensible than what Balthier had come to expect, through their forced clothing change. The Imperial Army apparently cared enough for propriety that they all were curtained from each other by only a flimsy wall of fabric.
He had not tried to peep at Fran; Balthier had marked it for its oddity.
All beings that liked the female humanoid body tried to sneak a glance if they thought they could. Especially a teenager who had already gawked once.
It was only when they were being tossed into the small holding area of a transport airship that Vaan had dropped like the proverbial stone. The Imperial officer in charge had simply thrown Vaan in after them and closed the door. Balthier seethed in the dim lighting of the transport cell.
The gods did not smile on them indeed.
“Well,” he said and glanced over to find Fran scowling down at the hume in her lap. Ah. “If you would--”
“Do not speak,” she snapped as her hands grasped at Vaan’s vest to roll him onto his back. “All my attention is required here. I’ve no time to coddle you.”
Balthier closed his mouth, stung. He had only been about to offer to shoulder the churl’s weight; Fran did not generally appreciate the touch of strange humes, even insensible ones.
He left her to her inspection, pointedly turned away from the spectacle she made as she tried, unsuccessfully, to stretch her hands flat to Vaan’s chest. He began an inspection of his own. Escape was unlikely on the transport, but stranger things had happened in his career as a sky pirate.
The bright flare of white magicks dragged his attention back towards Fran and the inconvenient burden in both of their laps.
“Come now,” he said. “‘Tis only a knock on that rather hard skull of his. There’s no need to waste magicks on it.” They’d seen the churl take any number of blows in the short hours they’d known him and he would always rise up readily enough afterwards. A few minutes more and he would probably be on his feet again, pacing and complaining mightily of the Empire.
Fran shot him an absolutely filthy look from beneath her brow and did not deign to answer. Her spell slid through Vaan and did naught to lighten the bruising that had begun to rise about his eyes. Fran herself seemed pleased with the outcome, though she immediately began casting again.
As long as they were being wasteful...
Balthier dropped his bound wrists to the churl’s knees.
He was not inept at the healing magicks. “Shall I?” he asked, and spun the barest beginning of a cure spell down into the boy to find what was vexing Fran so.
It was a shock, the mess the blow to Vaan’s head had left. The bruising to the churl’s face was the least of it. Here was a fracture line, the bone half-pulverized and shifted from where it should be, and there was delicate tissue overwhelmed as it bled into confined spaces, unseen tears in crucial structures oozing things Balthier did not have names for but knew should not be outside of their designated pathways.
His spell faltered at the sheer damage that an armored elbow had left in its wake.
He stared down at the churl, at the teenager, and feared.
“If I have need of your clumsy healing attempts, I shall advise you,” said Fran. “The mist is thin; do not draw on it.”
Instead of assisting with magicks, Balthier has found himself in the enviable position of providing stabilization. He is to keep the churl from flopping about when they are jostled by whatever unseen stretch of turbulence their Imperial guards pilot them through.
“Give me your hand,” Fran says.
Balthier obligingly hooks his smallest finger with hers, mindful of her claws, and waits to see what she has in mind. “And why are we holding hands?” he asks.
He feels it a moment later - a deep pull on his energy, a dizzying drain that hooks into the core of him without mercy. Exhaustion spreads in its wake, as though he hadn’t slept in years, as though he had spent more than just a night traipsing through a sewer.
The kind of exhaustion that reminds him of suffocating under heavy armor, under heavy orders.
It’s a struggle to remain calm, but his voice is admirably level when he says, “I believe we spoke about advising me prior to this particular spell?”
“I asked for your hand,” Fran says distractedly. “Did you think me juvenile enough to hold it?”
Now he can’t say that he did not even think to ask before he did as she requested.
“I’ll take what I need,” Fran says, “Not a drop more. You know this.”
He does know, damn it all. He can’t even properly object, not with how wan both of his travelling companions are - Fran with magick fatigue, Vaan with dire head trauma.
“One of us will need the strength to fight,” he reminds her.
“And so I shall be able,” Fran says, “With your borrowed magicks, if needs must. Hush.”
Balthier hushes.
He trails a quiet Libra down into Vaan, weaving around Fran’s spellwork, and sits back to absorb the information. The head wound is healing under Fran’s direction; the small, delicate work first, draining off the excess pressure, as new bone slowly creeps to replace the missing section. Even the bruising about the churl’s eyes has begun to fade into the yellows and pale purples of healing flesh.
He watches as another wave of magicks causes a slow drip of sticky fluid out of Vaan’s nostril. It dribbles from Vaan’s cheek to his own wrist; his gorge rises abruptly and without permission.
“Do not sick on him,” Fran warns. “He may drown in it.”
Balthier swallows harshly and coughs. “You’ve a way with words today,” he mutters. He pointedly smears the fluid back onto Vaan’s skin.
Fran does not scold him for it, so he continues to watch through lidded eyes as Vaan’s body slowly, slowly heals.
When they arrive, they are pulled less than kindly from their broiling transport and dragged through reeking tunnels. Vaan remains limp in his guard’s hold. Fran, Balthier notes, is perilously close to attacking their guards over the churl’s treatment.
Vaan is deposited onto his face not far from what is either an exceptionally slow breathing Bangaa, or a very fresh corpse. Balthier hopes for the former but is suspicious it is actually the latter.
“Water,” their guard grunts, and tosses a waterskin into the dust at their feet. “Rations are every morning at roll call. If you’re late, you get nothing.” He turns on his heel in that particular Archadian way that set never fails to set Balthier’s teeth on edge and manages to stomp loudly out of the room despite the abundance of sand.
“Charming,” Balthier says. He doesn’t scramble to recover the waterskin. Either its contents have already leaked onto the ground or they have not. No need to hurry to grasp it either way.
He straightens the too short cuffs of his prison raiment and tilts his head at Fran. “Do you suppose they did any work at all before they arbitrarily declared it a dungeon?” he asks.
The body in their cell is most definitely expired.
Someone screams; the cry echoes across stone and Fran’s ears twitch in agitation. “A torture chamber, it seems,” she says. “Little else.”
“Ah, but did they add it, or was there already a facility when they walled it off?” He bends to check Vaan. There is blood adhering to the whelp’s hair and they’ve no water to spare for cleaning. He worries the hair between his fingers instead, flaking dried blood from the strands with friction.
“Don’t fuss,” Fran says, crouching over the churl as well. “He’s unlike to note the blood among the other detritus of our night.” She draws her hand through his hair, magicks stirring sluggishly at her touch. The spell is wobbling with a marked lack of mist, but it is all they have here and it will have to do. She adjusts his head into a more comfortable position. “He will be fine. Humes are a hardy breed.”
“And this one is more hard-headed than most.” Balthier checks the pulse anyway.
It is steady beneath his touch. Fran pinches the top of his hand with her claws and clucks quietly. “You worry overmuch,” she says, as though she had not just spent hours delicately putting Vaan’s skull back together.
Balthier rises and dusts off his knees. “I worry the correct amount,” he says. He claims the waterskin from the ground, pleased to see that it is watertight and its contents slosh invitingly in his hand.
He graciously offers the first drink to Fran, who declines with an annoyed flick of one long ear. Balthier drinks as he contemplates Vaan and the unmerciful headache he is sure to wake with soon.
Could he trickle water down the boy’s throat? Best not to risk it.
Fran uses a handful of sand to scrub the semi-dried clear fluid from Vaan’s face. She pinches at Vaan’s mouth and sweeps a finger through it; Balthier is about to question her when she scoops a great glob of congealed blood from the back of his throat and flicks it to the ground.
Ah, there is his gorge again, right on cue.
“Must you?” he queries.
“You would have fretted if I did not check his airway,” she says airily.
“I would have done no such thing.”
“Hmm,” Fran says and prods at the back of the Vaan’s head. Nothing shifts obviously beneath her touch; her ears cant into a pleased slope and she smiles, just barely.
The churl must be healing well, for Fran takes her leave of them less than an hour later.
“I go to scout,” says Fran. “He is resting, nothing more. You may continue fussing while you rest as well.”
Balthier raises a brow. “While you leave us here, unattended? Come now, Fran. You would fret if we were both to sleep.”
“I did not say ‘sleep,’” Fran says. “I said ‘rest,’ which you may do with your eyes open, the better to keep true watch.”
By mutual decision, they leave Vaan lying next to their new corpse friend.
He watches her leave. It does, admittedly, lose something when she is not in her usual garb. The look Fran throws over her shoulder promises dire consequences if he mentions it.
Balthier reclines against a pillar to monitor the slow rise and fall of the churl’s back beneath his ill-fitting prison garb. The last of the bruising is rapidly fading from his face, though he still looks wan and pained.
A fine mess they’ve gotten themselves into, all for want of Dalmascan treasure they hadn’t even properly stolen before it was seized from them in turn.
“I should have left you on the ramparts,” Balthier muses. He leans back and closes his eyes; the night has been overlong and the morning has dragged unmercifully as well. “You would have ended up in the same place, and with much less fuss.”
He can’t even lay the blame for it at another’s feet. He wouldn’t be much of a leading man if he’d left a wide-eyed teenager to be slaughtered by over-eager Imperial simpletons.
The churl groans quietly.
Balthier opens his eyes to find Vaan stirring.
“You’re awake,” he says, and hopes for the best.