the trick is to keep breathing

Fran breaks the news as if commenting on some change in the weather. Balthier supposes she is, in a way. Her voice is level, her ruby gaze clear even as she speaks of her immediate departure.

Balthier imagined they would part ways during an ill-fated escapade: a well-aimed bullet plunging through his left breast, or maybe a quick-drawn dagger flashing fast across his throat. Never leaving of their own volition, never the unfathomable thought of Fran dying. He didn’t expect to part so willingly, and on an occasion as unremarkable as this – a routine supplies run in Balfonheim on a day slightly too muggy to call fair.

They stand together, silent in the cockpit, Balthier for once at a loss for words. For a frantic heartbeat, he considers asking her to stay. But it passes, and he understands she is not asking for permission to leave; she is extending him a proper farewell. It’s a courtesy she would not afford a lesser man.

“I won’t begrudge you your freedom, Fran,” he promises; slowly, finally, testing the words against his heart and finding they ring true. To force her stay would pain them both.

“And grateful I will be for it,” she replies in turn.

“The skies will be lonely without a leading lady flying at the helm.”

She is gentle in rebuffing Balthier’s theatrics today. “You are no longer alone as I met you,” Fran reminds him. “Our friends spread Ivalice-wide.”

“Yet none make a sky pirate finer than you.” He sighs in earnest – a partnership like his and Fran’s is unparallelled in all of Ivalice, Balthier is certain. He doubts he can find another partner of her calibre; he cannot be sure he will ever want another partner.

“Fortunate I have been,” Fran muses. “To traverse the realms with a companion unlike any other. Honourable beyond years, steadfast and capable, with folding wings and Jagd-resistant skystone…” She drags a fingernail along the wide sweep of the Strahl’s controls before fixing Balthier with a solemn stare. “And I suppose there was also you, Balthier.” Only the slightest twitch of her nose betrays her jest.

Balthier huffs an incredulous laugh. “Now you find your humour, old girl?”

Fran but tilts her head. Her lips are quirked in a soft, sedate smile. “I will miss you,” is her candid non-answer.

He smiles back. “And I you.”

She nods, then: “The time for my departure draws nigh.”

“To where are you headed?” “Will we ever cross paths?” “What calling tempts you so, to draw you away from my side?”

There are a hundred questions Balthier could ask, and the viera would grace none of them with an answer. This is her way, and he would not have her any different. So instead, Balthier follows until the door and says, “Good luck, Fran.” And as an afterthought: “Not that you need it.”

Already astride the gangplank, Fran peers up at him. Her nose twitches again. “Luck? I never took you as one of such uncertain belief,” she teases.

“I’m not.” Balthier throws his arms out in a shrug. “A lucky man by another name is nought but an opportune fool. Luck means little to we, who have faced the weavers of fate themselves and emerged their betters.”

It’s a testament to the trials they’ve faced, that this is not a boast but a statement of fact. Fran says nothing, but her ears twitch inward in a laugh.

Balthier drops his arms. “But there is a ritual to parting, all the same.”

Fran smiles in acknowledgement, turns to leave. The sight of her disembarking stirs something in Balthier, and he feels the fumbling, desperate hume he was their first meeting.

“Fran, I – ” He coughs; she pauses and moves to face him again. “There will always be a room for you aboard the Strahl, you know that.”

She cocks her right ear in a question and steps closer. He rambles on. “I’ve been… to have found a friend and partner such as you, truly I am the lucky one – ”

Fran closes the remaining distance with a single stride. She presses her lips to his; it’s a chaste kiss, and Balthier knows it to be the first and last they will ever share. Her kiss is suffused with love and a sorrow that burns deep in their marrow, because Fran and Balthier are each other’s best, dearest thing, and they will soon part for an eternity interminable.

Balthier dreamt of this touch when he was still Ffamran wearing a false name, and his affection for the enigmatic viera was by halves adulation and artless lust. He fancied him the luckiest man in the world, he who knew a viera’s lips. Now Balthier would do anything to avoid Fran’s kiss, if only it meant she would stay by his side a minute longer.

She breaks away first, examining him, reading his eyes, perhaps – his mind seems to have hit a spot of Jagd, and his expression is surely unbefitting of a leading man – her nose twitches once more. Does she find him so laughable?

He opens his mouth, and Fran silences him with a raised finger. She traces the planes of his face as she traced the curves of the Strahl: lovingly, reverently, with a tenderness that belies her fierce nails.

“My fool pirate…” she begins, finger ghosting along his cheekbone. “A kiss... for luck,” she continues, following the line of his jaw. “Not that you need it.” She draws back, eyes glimmering, as her thumb runs across his bottom lip. His own eyes have gone inexplicably misty. To have sailed the skies alongside Fran, how opportune a fool he’s been indeed.

Balthier watches her slip away, mingling in the aerodome’s crowds with an uncanny ease for a figure as striking as she. Tall ears bob above the sea of heads – he commits the sight to memory as they surface once, twice, thrice in a flash of ebony-dappled white – then vanish completely as Fran turns out of view.