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“You are troubled.”
Balthier barely stirs at the soft sound of her voice; he hadn’t heard her approach, but when does he ever? He tosses a glance over his shoulder to find the viera glowering at him from the doorway. “Thought you turned down the offer of a late-night tryst with me moons ago, Fran,” he murmurs. His tongue is thick in his mouth, his words slow, slurred. “Change of heart?”
“It is not my heart that is changed.”
“Ha! Feisty, feisty.” With a grunt Balthier rolls onto his side, reaching as he does for the half-empty bottle of porter by his bed. Far from his first choice, this, but when he went in search of something sweet and strong earlier he found the stores all but empty; that bastard captain, he bets, hungry still after so many years of starvation. Balthier knows a thing or two about privation. He clears his throat. “Had you need of me, or are you visiting merely to exercise your wit?”
Fran frowns, crossing one long leg in front of the other to step fully into the room. Her silence is not unusual, nor is it unnerving, but it is uncomfortable, if only because Balthier feels oh-so obliged to break it.
“You’d swear you’d not seen me in my cups before.”
“I have not – not over one such as this.”
“Pardon?”
“The hume child,” she says plainly. “Vaan.”
What is there to say to that?
Though she has never held it for more than a moment, Fran has always known his heart better than he himself could ever hope to. There is no hiding from her, and besides, what need has he to hide anything? There was nothing there to begin with. Balthier turns away, sullen at the thought of there being nothing, sullen at the thought of there being something, sullen at the thought of there being anything to think of at all. He wishes for the world to leave him be. He has no ear for any of it now – gods, he has hardly the stomach for that slime parading itself as stout, soothing though its sting may be.
His head aches. He cannot hold onto any one thought long enough to think on it as anything more than a glimpse, a glance at an abstraction. This piss packs its own punch. What is he thinking? That he had thought that he would be asked again. It was – well, it was a selfish thing to think, but his thoughts have always been self-directed. He could bear to be seen by none other than himself. He had thought that he would be asked again. The question came prematurely, passed lips that had hardly the right to ask it, and he chuckled, he thinks, or he chastised, but in any event he gave the age-old answer, one word, two letters. He did not dress it up for the desert-dweller as he had done for other debutantes and dandies; he was honest, or as close to it as he might come.
And why would he? He would be asked again.
But what he he hoped for, in being asked again? That he might look to acquiesce? That he might look to accept what was asked of him with an air of resignation, of reluctance? He supposes it might be that. It would not do to be otherwise; indeed, he is not so certain that it could be otherwise with him. Balthier has never thought to take anything of anyone that was not already asking to be taken, and when he tries now to think of how he might himself word the want – the want of what? – he finds he cannot. His temples thrum. He is a man of fine tastes, but so too is he a man of fast tasting – wine was never any the better for having waited, and he has long been of the belief that would-be bedfellows were surely no different.
Vaan, however…is Vaan different?
“You will not go to him,” Fran says.
“I will not.”
He hears her sigh. “I do not understand,” she mutters. “You are a thief; why turn tail here, when what you want is to take him? I do not understand,” she says again, and sighs again, and stands – or stands in Balthier’s mind – with her hands on her hips in that displeased way of hers, her dark eyes aglint with something awful. His head spins too swift for him to open his eyes and look on her now, but he is certain that she is as he thinks her to be; how he lacks the courage to meet her stare even in the image of her he conjures. “I do not understand.”
“How could you?” Balthier chuckles. “I hardly understand it myself.”
Fran will not entice him to talk. She knows better than to try. The click of the door’s handle and the creak of its hinges signal her departure before she deigns speak again. “You are as hopeless a fool as he.”
Balthier laughs louder as the door swings shut – so lively, Fran, and so lovely, even if not to his eyes. He had not expected anything else; a word of kindness from her would kill him far quicker than a word of criticism, and gods, after all this time, what place has kindness between them? He turns to lay on his back, takes a breath that burns. The sound of footsteps. He is trembling. What if – what if it were poison instead of port in the pantry? The thought amuses him, absurd as it is, and takes him from more unpleasant places. He imagines himself growing gravely ill in this little room in as much detail as his drunken mind might allow him to, thinking now of how it would fall upon him so fast, a fever, first, a flush of the face, a sheen of sweat over the skin, and then, slowing, slowing, slowing almost to a stop, the soft spread of the same over his chest, as warm within as without. Fitful and frightened, hardly holding to himself, he would call hoarsely into the hall; at first none would hear or none would heed, but he would not give up – no, no, disconsolate, dispossessed of any sense of decorum or dignity, he would continue to cry until one, only one, came to him.
What would he say, then, in that delirious state?
He opens his mouth, set to speak, though stops just short of sound. What sort of pathetic attempt at pantomime is this? Balthier realises after a moment that the smile he had so scornfully thrown Fran has fallen to a frown, or – no, not quite a frown, not with the lips parted as such. Blithely and bitterly it occurs to him what it is he is truly thinking of. His body betrays his head against his heart, as it always does; is that not how this started, after all? Listening to one while loathsomely lacking the strength to listen to the other, so that now the one he would have has no interest in either part of him.
It is warranted, he knows. It is what he wanted. It is his response to the request, made in such eager and earnest honesty that he was for a moment taken aback atop this bed, that he was for a moment of a mind to say something else entirely, even with the certainty that he would be asked again. He could not have given voice to it, of course: it was a fleeting thing, a lapse of logic that lasted only as long as the look between them; more than that, however, it was a ferocious thing, a hiccup of his heart that halted any sense that he might somehow come through this unchanged, with or without the other. How could he hand himself over so readily? A lick of that flame had burned so brightly; what would a lifetime do? What was asked of him in that moment was too much: it was his self, his very self, the one unchanging constant that he had always counted on above any and all other. He sees it now as a matter of exchange, of equation rather than extraction, but in that moment – just then, in that moment, was he not right to refuse?
Little matter now. He hums something – the words he should have said, and would have, had he been asked again – into his drink, though there is none to hear it besides the baseboards of the bed and the bottom of the bottle.