#having her turn back and have balthier and vaan waiting her (and everyone else further back) is just....... hmmm..... them.

[joulethieves]

WOW stellazzio preview I just wrote? Sure. Trying to get warmed up for nanowrimo. This takes place in chapter uhhhhhhh. 9 of 13, I think. They have arrived in Archades.

The slant of the dying sun illuminates the windowpanes of Archades’ monoliths, swathing the city in russet-gold. For a moment it resembles Dalmasca and Her red-clay cliffs along the Ester, but the familiarity does little to douse the anger still vibrant and bubbling in the pit of Vaan’s being.

“Do you have any idea what that stunt you pulled could have cost us?” Balthier seethes, the rasp of his hushed whisper reminiscent of a snake. Vaan flinches. His shadow looms over Vaan, who refuses to look back at the pirate. “That scene garnered more attention than our lark in Bhujerba. What exactly was your plan, hm? Have you learned nothing of our journey thus far? Vaan--”

“They were trying to buy her!” Vaan nearly shouts. His fists clench at his sides and finally Balthier sees his eyes, the fury in them, the undeniable glisten of hot tears. The glare of the sun bounces off a nearby windowpane and paints the bruise on his face in a spotlight. Vaan still wears the mark of that scum of a gentry across his face. He could have healed it, easily. But he doesn’t. “They were trying to buy Penelo. Like she was cattle. In broad daylight.”

Balthier’s lip curls in disgust as the reality smites him. “Classy as ever, Archades.”

But Vaan doesn’t laugh. When he speaks next, his voice is tighter. “They didn’t care what she thought. What I thought. What any of us think - any of us,” and here Vaan gestures to himself, his tanned Dalmascan skin, his flaxen hair, everything Archadia is not. “We’re less than people here. Even with a stupid chop. Not even that’s good enough.”

With disgust and defeat, Vaan throws the chop across the alley’s width, and it bounces off the brick onto the cobblestone. It bounces just once, scuffing the waxy coat. Balthier still knows of a place that polishes them, and finds the memory holds no comfort. He wishes he could forget such things, but despite himself, he picks up the chop anyhow. Aside from the scuff, it bears the same exact resemblance as anyone else’s, although Balthier acknowledge it is Vaan’s, and Vaan’s alone. Jules had played them all for fools earlier, but in doing so only proved Vaan’s gumption and charming tact; perhaps it was exactly that spectacle that drew the rogue gentry to him and Penelo, frolicking about the Uppers like exotic gypsies. That seemed easy enough: blame Jules. It’s better than blaming Vaan, who, when Balthier hands back the chop, turns away from it in disgust.

“I don’t want it. I don’t want to belong here.”

But Balthier just closes his fingers around the smoothed wood, grabs Vaan’s wrist, and places it within the palm now far more pliant in his grip. “Take it back,” Balthier says, “and make it yours. You earned it.”

“I don’t want it,” Vaan bites back, capricious. “I don’t want anything here.”

“Just hours before, you were enamoured with this very city.”

“Yeah, well I changed my mind.”

Balthier laughs, but not at Vaan, and not aloud. He buries the sound within the wall of his teeth. “Then we are not so different, you and I.” He’s still holding Vaan’s wrist in his hand when he lowers it and adds, “if only it hadn’t taken me sixteen years to learn it.”

The sun sets faster in Archades. Not really - but the city eats the light hungrily all the same, and soon they are left enshrouded in the shadow of the alley. Without the glare of the sun, Vaan’s face has softened, and it is he who pulls away from Balthier’s grip. 

“You don’t know what it’s like,” he says, “to be seen as an outsider everywhere you go. In Rabanastre, I used to belong. Then I--we--became orphans. It was like we weren’t Dalmascans anymore. We just existed there. And yeah, it’s only been two years, but it’s amazing what that did to us. It was like I didn’t belong anywhere. We weren’t good enough for anything. And even when we had money, booths didn’t want it. Not from us. When Archadians came, all they wanted was the money from people who had this.”

Vaan’s fingers bloom around the chop again, framing the writ of passage with dirty, dull nails and scuffed gauntlets. “And now I finally have it. What they want. What everyone wants. And where did it get me? Face-down on the ground, and thrown into a fountain.” His laugh sounds unlike him, too cynical for Vaan. He’s not one to laugh at things like this, and Balthier doesn’t like it. Archades works its grip strong in any pure of heart that dare venture here, and Balthier feels the urge suddenly to spirit them away back to Tchita under the stars where they both can breathe feel like they belong. 

It’s his turn to laugh.

“And to think, it’s been six years. And you - you’ve not been here even six hours. Yet here we are, already itching to leave.”

“I can see why you got out of here,” Vaan murmurs. And finally--finally, Vaan looks at him for the first time since last night. For some reason, it has felt like longer. His eyes are lush like a swollen raincloud and Balthier finds himself parched. “All these buildings clog up the sky, huh.”

It is with a gentle touch that Balthier guides Vaan towards the exit of the alley, where he will bring them both to the inn Jules secured for them on a lesser-traversed street. There, a bath and a bed await, both he cannot wait any longer in which to indulge. “You’ll see soon enough what truly was the last straw that sent me me cloudborne,” Balthier says darkly. “Draklor awaits our shining faces first thing in the morning.”

Vaan makes a face at that. He’s tired. Balthier, too. Hell - they’re all bloody tired and tonight will be the first night in weeks any of them have had a bed. A real bed - not a cot, not a lump of grass in a field, not a bedroll at a hunter’s camp. A real gods-bedamned mattress, boxspring, and frame.

And a bath. Balthier feels he could weep.

As they emerge from the alley onto the street, foot traffic has slowed. It’s a residential neighborhood and most pedestrians are home now with their families, settled down within their brownstones for dinner. Trees dot the pavement in perfect symmetry, even lines, and meticulously spherical topiaries. They resemble moogle pompoms, he always used to think as a child. He still does, now.

“You kept your own chop. Even after all these years. Were you always planning on coming back?” Vaan’s thoughts bring him back to the present. Balthier shakes his head.

“The first rule of thumb as a leading man - always expect the unexpected. Improvisation is a given in my line of work.” A wink, just for show, but Vaan’s looking at the trees. “Best to come prepared.”

“So...you’re saying I should hold onto mine too?”

“Archades is a city of closed doors. That’s your key. If you ever care to return, you’d do best to hold onto it.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then it makes a fine paperweight.”

Vaan’s mouth quirks to the side, and he bits the corner of it, white teeth on lips chapped by dry northern wind. Balthier doesn’t miss the gesture, and remembers the feeling of them from last night, all too vividly for a kiss that lasted barely a bruising three seconds. He imagines the pad of his thumb running along it, applying a rosewater balm to that pout before further slickening it with his own tongue, but shoves the thought away. 

“Hey,” Vaan says as they amble down the street, his temper simmered away to the softer desert boy Balthier has come to know in the night, “those funny trees look like moogle pompoms.”

Balthier smiles, and tilts his head. “Why, yes--I suppose they do.”

#balvaan #my writing #stellazzio