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Basch finds his brother’s name does not fit him, nor his station. The rigid bureaucracy of the Archadian Empire chafes. (So, too, does the heavy ensemble of the judge’s suit of armor, designed more for pageantry than practicality. Their old victories against Judges Ghis and Bergan are cast in a far less impressive light when he realizes just how ill-suited for battle the uniform truly is.)
He understands why he must take up the mantle. Gabranth was a trusted member of the Archadian elite. He garnered respect and power. His position at the side of the soon-to-be Emperor Larsa would hardly be questioned, much less scrutinized.
Not like Basch fon Ronsenburg, who would have to spend the rest of his life clearing his name. And evidence or no, exculpation or no, he would never truly be trusted. Regicide would follow him forever, a black mark against his reputation. Unshakable.
No, Basch fon Ronsenburg would not be able to keep his promise.
This is what’s best.
Still, he cannot deny that it weighs on him—the gossip, the stares. The way they look at him and shake their heads. The way they pity “Gabranth” for his unseemly relation, his disgraceful brother. The kingslayer poisoning the fon Ronsenburg name. They chatter as though he cannot hear, as though sound does not travel for miles in the vast and echoing halls of the palace.
There’s an irony to the whole affair: Basch’s name to Gabranth’s crimes, Gabranth’s face to Basch’s new life. He wears his brother’s identity as his brother once wore his.
Perhaps it’s foolish to feel such attachment to a name. Afterall, the man who committed the crime is dead and buried and the innocent one walks free. And isn’t that justice? Shouldn’t that be its own kind of peace?
Shouldn’t he be happy—consider himself lucky—to have this, after years strung up in a cage?
(Trouble is, selfish as the thought may be, this is not how he imagined his freedom. He trusts Lord Larsa’s vision of peace, but he will never feel safe in Archadia.)
-
Everyday, Lord Larsa grows taller and wiser. When Basch first arrived with him in Archadia, the dissension amongst the court was palpable and dangerous. The Empire did not care to have a child at its helm—not even a child of Larsa’s lineage. Basch quickly found himself positioned not only as Larsa’s protector, but as his advocate.
And eventually, the tide of opinion turned. Larsa proved himself a compassionate ruler with a knack for foreign relations. He brokered the treaties which finally put to bed years and years of war. Public approval rose. The Empire stabilized. The kingdom grew quiet.
After so long fighting, Basch finds himself shockingly adrift once the war is won.
These days, Basch feels like an extra limb on the body of Archadia. He might have felt more at home in Lady Ashe’s court, helping to rebuild Dalmasca in the wake of the war. But Dalmasca no longer needs him. And as the months go on, neither it seems does the House of Solidor.
But he keeps his promise.
He attends meetings. He gives counsel. He signs his name to toothless domestic decrees. The work is honest but thankless. It’s work that needs doing. But Basch was a soldier; he feels displaced in the life of a politician. Surely there are others—scholars and statisticians—who could better serve the Empire in his place.
Still, he mans his post, even when he finds little comfort in it. For the good of Archadia. For the good of Ivalice. For the brother he lost long before he buried him.
He is a man of his word even if he is no longer Basch fon Ronsenburg.
-
Basch returns to his chambers at the end of the day feeling like he’s been magicked slow—his limbs and heart heavy in a way they’ve no business being after such light works. It grates on him, this place.
He has several sprawling rooms allotted to him. Larsa would have given him a whole floor had he asked, but Basch has never been a man of means. The opulence of the palace unnerves him. Nothing about it ever feels lived in, despite its many luxuriant comforts.
The heavy, oaken door swings closed behind him with an echoing thud. The sound reverberates against the inside of his skull. Sighing, he lingers in the entryway and unfastens his gauntlets. He flexes his hands and wonders if the ache in his joints comes simply from age or from the years spent wrapped around the hilt of a sword.
You can take the soldier from the war but not the war from the soldier, it seems.
A honeyed, familiar voice startles him from his thoughts.
“Now, what good is all this palace security if you can’t even lock your study door?” someone purrs from the corner of the room.
Whirling around, Basch finds a smug looking sky pirate seated at his desk—his feet propped up amongst official documents and reports with no regard for their wellbeing. Fran sits perched on the table beside him.
Neither of them looks quite how Basch remembers: older, wearier, peppered with scars he does not recognize from their travels. But there could be no mistaking who it is.
His heart stutters up into his mouth. Two years of grief and goodbyes take flight from his chest like uncaged birds. And yet, somehow, Basch finds himself unsurprised. A part of him never truly believed them dead, even after the well of hope should have long run dry.
They simply couldn’t be. It was impossible.
Balthier talks of locked doors and Basch musters up a voiceless chuckle. His words sound thin and strained even to his own ears when he tries to joke, “Since when have locked doors ever stood in the way of ghosts?”
“If we were ghosts,” Balthier hums with a grin, “we’d have had a far easier time getting past the front gate.”
Forgoing composure and ceremony, Bash rushes then to span the distance between them. He drags Balthier to his feet as he gathers him in a sweeping hug. “Once a pirate, always a pirate,” he laughs brightly.
“Easy there, ironsides,” Balthier grunts, squirming out of the armor-clad embrace.
Still buzzing with excitement, Basch releases Balthier only to turn to Fran like an overeager hound. She offers him a warm smile.
“It is good to see you, Basch fon Ronsenburg,” she murmurs, a genuine fullness to her tone.
The strangeness of it—of hearing his own name—glues him to the spot. He’s grown unaccustomed to answering to it.
“You as well,” he echoes. The timbre of his voice wobbles just a little. Basch is certainly no stranger to grief, to loss, to guilt. But, by the gods, he missed them.
This close, he can see them more clearly even in the dim glow of the electric lamps. It seems neither of them escaped the Bahamut unscathed.
Fran wears her scars unself-consciously. The notch in her ear, the slice across the seam of her lips, the burns puckering the landscape of her shoulders. She notices him looking—notices, too, the pained expression that creases his brow.
“They are only scars,” she reassures unprompted.
Without thinking, Basch raises a hand as if to reach out and touch them only to remember himself mere inches away. She holds her ground and watches, as if waiting for him to finish what he started and span the last of the distance. But he doesn’t. He lets his arm fall back against his side.
“Potions should have healed these,” he murmurs. He thinks of the deep scars that mark his face and back and how the wounds only went so long unhealed because his captors hoped he’d die of them. It seems a long time past, now. Another life. A sadder one.
“We healed what we could,” Fran tells him.
Balthier waves a hand. “Consider us lucky we walked out in one piece, at all.”
For all his showboating, Balthier seems less comfortable under Basch’s attention. Pockmarked shrapnel scars mar his jaw and throat. A wicked, hook-shaped line curls from his cheekbone and up his temple. More must be lurking beneath the high collar of his shirt. Whatever befell them in the belly of that airship, it’s a miracle they survived it.
Balthier returns Basch’s gaze with a stubborn jut of his chin. “Not the beauty you remember, eh?” he jokes, but the words come out too tight. His forced levity is unconvincing.
Rather than insult him with platitudes, Basch merely grins and teases, “You haven’t aged a day.”
It startles a laugh from Balthier—something unguarded and honest, entirely different from the measured, pretty chuckles he usually allows himself.
“Ah, but you have,” he counters, warm and without malice. Basch knows it to be true. The blonde of his beard has long since tipped prematurely grey and now the hair on his head has begun to follow suit. Tutting, Balthier reaches out to ruffle his hair and teases, “Such a shame to have missed the last years of your youth, old man.”
The words—however good-natured, however fond—bring Basch back to himself. Back to the reality of the last two years and the sorrow of them.
Anger follows in the footsteps of relief.
He ducks away from Balthier’s touch. “Missed it why, exactly?” he demands. “Where have you been all these months?” He finds himself flustered and stammering around his own sudden fury. “We—we sent rescue parties in after you! We combed the rubble! We thought you crushed.”
Balthier waves a dismissive hand, unmoved by Basch’s anger. “Yes, well, things were rather a blur after the crash.” He offers up a thin smile. There’s something cold beneath the lilt of his voice when he adds, “I do seem to recall a fairly serious headwound.”
“And after?” Basch pushes. “What stopped you, then?”
Making no effort to disguise the way he rolls his eyes, Balthier drops heavily into the seat again. He tips back and returns his boots to the tabletop with two definitive thunks. Lacing his fingers behind his head, he singsongs, "Frankly, I needed to figure out how your little ragtag gang tricked me into joining your revolution.”
“Tricked you?!” Basch sputters. Balthier talks over him.
“Unlike you, I don’t need some lofty cause to tie my banner to. In fact, I prefer to stay as far away from all that as possible. And yet, against all odds, there I was willing to die for all of you.”
Basch knows Balthier too well to believe this attempt at grandstanding. But the deflection infuriates him—strikes a match against his ribs until he goes up like dry kindling.
“Two years gone and still you slither back from the truth,” Basch snarls.
(He’ll regret the words when he’s more clearheaded; Balthier has never been half so unreliable as he pretends to be. A pirate, sure, but not a liar. Not in the ways that matter.”
“Were you dead—” He starts, but Balthier interrupts him.
Grinning through gritted teeth, he white-knuckles his own cover story.
“Were I dead,” Balthier interjects, “then there’d be no opportunity for the Lady Ashe to go bestowing me with medals or whatever else she might be wont to do.” His faux carelessness grates against Basch’s every atom. “You know I prefer my business private.”
Hands balled into fists at his sides, Basch turns an accusatory glare on Fran. “And you agreed with this selfishness?”
Unlike Balthier, Fran’s calm remains uncracked and genuine. She shakes her head. “I did not stay. I went to the wood. I wanted to hear her song again.”
There’s no sharpness to her voice, and yet he finds himself feeling chided all the same—foolish and foolhardy, as he’s always been. “Oh,” he mumbles, casting his gaze to the ground. Some mixture of curiosity and decorum interrupts the momentum of his anger and he finds himself compelled to ask, “And did you? Hear her song?”
Fran’s voice goes soft and wistful as though she is suddenly far away. “Yes,” she says. “It is even more beautiful than I remembered.”
“Jote allowed you to stay in the village?” he asks. When last they visited Golmore jungle, Fran was not welcome in it.
“Not at first.” Fran casts a thoughtful look out the window. Basch is struck with the impossible, absurd thought that her keen ears might still hear the whisper of the wood even here. “Mjrn had a hand in changing her heart.”
Bracing his hands on the table, Basch feels his frustration giving way like a thread unraveled from its weave. It’s too taxing to keep a hold of it.
“I’m glad to hear it,” he sighs. And he is. But he is also tired, and heavy with a grief which now feels strange and unmoored with the two of them alive and tangible in front of him. Voice subdued, he turns to Balthier and says, “You could have told us you lived and still had your freedom."
“No,” Balthier counters, his tone shockingly gentle and sincere all of the sudden. “I couldn’t have.” He offers a crooked smile that belies a kind of bone-weary exhaustion. For the first time since they arrived in his rooms, Basch feels he is looking at the man instead of the mask.
Swinging his feet back to the floor, Balthier taps his fingers soundlessly against the plush arm of the chair. “The leading man rides an enemy airship into the ground, he doesn’t get privacy. He gets—titles. Honors. Awards.”
Basch raises an eyebrow. “How difficult for you,” he drawls flatly.
“It’s not the sort of attention I want,” Balthier insists. “I needed—time.”
“Two years?” Basch asks.
Balthier aims a cowed smile at the tabletop. “Running away is a hard habit to break, I suppose.”
“And you?” he asks Fran, although his voice rings fragile without the anger to buoy it.
She crosses her arms and leans her hip against the desk. “Had I returned alone, there would have been questions.” Glancing at Balthier, her left ear twists briefly in his direction and she sighs. “Questions neither of us were prepared to answer, I think.”
She pins Basch with a look that seems to peer right through to the heart of him. He finds himself frozen in place. “I do not regret joining your revolution, Basch fon Ronsenburg. But I had much to consider after it was won.”
“Like what?” he can’t help but ask, despite the fact that it should be no business of his.
“Like the future of Ivalice,” she answers, “and my place within it. Viera lives are long. I had to decide what it was that I wanted.”
He manages a weak smile. “And you chose piracy?”
She smirks back at him. “I chose an open sky and a trustworthy partner.”
“Have you thought about it?” Balthier volleys back at him. “About what it is that you want?”
For a moment, the question sticks to Basch, cloying and confusing—something he was unprepared to answer. So, he reverts to the world he knows. He joins his hands at the small of his back (no small feat with the armor restricting his way) and widens his stance. Chin high. Spine straight.
“My future is best spent protecting the future of my kingdom.”
“Aye, ‘tis true,” Fran agrees.
Basch catches the startled, frustrated expression Balthier casts her. He wonders if their time spent traveling together taught him their tells or if they’ve simply grown more transparent with age.
She takes a step closer—close enough that he’s reminded of just how tall she is and has to tip his head back to hold her gaze. Never mind the way it sets his heart to hammering.
“I’m sure,” she says, “that Archadia has taken great strides, with you to stay their course.”
Her hand finds his jaw. It’s the ghost of a touch. He barely resists the impulse to tip into it.
“You paid your debts to this country,” she muses, pragmatic and dry—as though she were stating an objective fact rather than a convenient truth which could be warped to fit any argument’s fancy. Loyalty and responsibility are such tenuous, malleable things.
“You upheld your duty,” she continues. Her tone softens when she draws her thumb across his cheek and adds, “You sacrificed much. Is this what you want for your service?”
They stand surrounded by gold fixtures so polished they could rival the yellow glow of storm magicite. Fine wood carvings inlaid with tortoiseshell trace intricate patterns up and down the wall in ribbons of mahogany and bone. The upholsteries lining even the most mundane of furniture boast the softest furs and silks a man could own in a thousand lifetimes.
“It’s scarcely a hardship,” Basch scoffs, but he convinces no one.
Balthier steps into his space wearing the kind of expression one would expect to see on an appraiser’s face at a jeweler’s. Basch wonders if he will be found wanted or wanting.
“It’s a bad color on you, Captain,” Balthier hums, only to cock his head and correct himself with a wry, “Or should I say, Judge Magister.”
“What color?” he asks with a puff of dismissive laughter. “Iron and steel?”
“Red tape,” Balthier retorts. He reaches out in that overly familiar way of his and tugs Basch’s breastplate better centered on his chest. Its leather straps press briefly into his waist and shoulders, and it feels almost as though Balthier’s hands have found him there too, despite never touching any part of him save the cold metal of his armor. “Bureaucracy doesn’t sit right on you.”
He knows it isn’t meant as an insult and yet he bristles all the same. “Because I was not born into it as you were?” he snaps.
Balthier’s curious, amused expression barely flickers. “Indeed,” he agrees cheerfully. “And believe you me, you should take it as a complement.”
Without asking for permission or explaining himself, Balthier takes him by the wrist and turns his hand over—palm up—and casually begins unbuckling the vambrace around his forearm.
“Surely you aren’t happy here,” he comments breezily. He slides the vambrace and couter off Basch’s left arm before moving to his right. As though on cue, Fran steps forward to undo the fastenings on his pauldrons.
There’s something all at once intimate and entirely mundane about it. They each move with professional efficiency. Were the conversation less loaded, there might be no reason for his breath to stutter so, at all.
(And, truly, he’s grateful for the help. The armor is heavy and unwieldy, and he doesn’t much care for the man he becomes when he is inside of it.)
He sidesteps Balthier’s question about happiness. He presents, instead, a true answer to the wrong question.
“I am at my best where I am needed.”
Fran nods as she lifts pauldron and cuirass away from his body and deposits them on the desk. His armor doesn’t belong there. An errant beveled edge is bound to dig into the soft parchments lining the table. And yet, he finds himself less mired in the concept of paperwork than he once was, only hours ago.
He feels lighter: all static electricity and sweetwine, like the fizzing aftertaste of an ether.
Fran hovers behind him, so close that he’s hyperaware of the space between them. She trails her knuckles gently along the seam of his cotton tunic as she moves to unbuckle his breastplate. He shivers. He isn’t fool enough to think they don’t notice, but they do him the dignity of not mentioning it.
“Your halls echo,” Fran comments as she unfastens each strap in turn. “Empty even to hume ears, I would think.”
She’s right. For all the staff, the guards, the noblemen and politicians wandering its floors, the palace feels sometimes as dead as Nabudis. He tells himself it is not so. He tells himself he sees ghosts because he wants to, because he goes looking for them.
No longer does he jump at shadows, but this place will never truly be home.
Divested of his armor, Basch stands between them and wonders at what to do with his hands. He can feel Balthier’s eyes on him but doesn’t dare meet them. “I cannot leave,” he sighs. “I swore to protect Lord Larsa.”
“And protect him you have,” Balthier says. He levels Basch with a thoughtful expression and keeps his tone forcibly light as he muses, “You’re a better man than I—keeping a promise to the brother who put you behind bars.” His brows lift, as though he knows just how deep he cuts when he adds, “And who stole your name.”
Basch shrinks from the idea. “What know you of names?” he scoffs. “You gave yours up.”
“I think,” Balthier singsongs, although there’s a dangerous edge to his cheerful tone, “that that should prove I know a great deal about names. And the weight of them.” He takes a step closer. “I left Ffamran Bunansa behind. Buried him. You wear Gabranth like an ill-fitted suit.”
As if to punctuate his point, he takes Basch by the chin and tilts his head from one side to another, examining him. Basch does not flinch back, although if it’s his soldier’s training or Balthier’s magnetism holding him in place, even he isn’t sure.
“You already won your war, Captain,” Balthier says. “So, why are you still fighting?”
Basch ducks his head then, struck with a sudden wave of anonymous shame. He stumbles a few steps away from them, far enough that he can clear his head and think. Shoulders drawn, he stares down at his feet.
“War is all I know,” he confesses.
Fran extends a clawed hand to him, palm up. He stares at first, unsure if he might truly be allowed to take it, to touch her. But she does not withdraw.
“Then let us teach you peace,” she offers.
He stares at her extended palm, a tightness in his throat so acute that he almost fears to use his own voice in the wake of it.
“I think,” he says, pinched, “that the two of you know less of peace than you’d want me to believe.”
Balthier rolls his eyes. “My, my, aren’t you feeling insightful this evening?” he teases.
Fran echoes Balthier’s smile, although she wears hers in a quieter, more private way. “He has a point,” she muses. One of her clawed fingers alights gently on the underside of his chin, tipping his head up until he looks her in the eye. “Shall we learn of peace together, then?”
Hope flutters alive in his chest: new and fragile as a freshly hatched chick. “Surely you didn’t come all the way to Archadia just to steal me away,” he says, unable to hide the grin on his face.
“We are pirates, are we not?” Balthier purrs with the confidence of a man who knows he holds the winning hand at cards.
Basch hardly thinks himself a prize. (Even if the idea does send his heart skittering in circles around his chest.) Clearing his throat, he asks, “Are you sure I wouldn’t simply be—” he casts a somewhat bashful glance between the two of them, “in the way?”
“Captain,” Balthier tuts, his tone honeyed and warm beneath the playful scorn. He slings an arm around Basch’s shoulder and aims a wink and a grin in Fran’s direction. “You can’t crash a party if you’re invited.”