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rose_in_winterCharacters: Balthier, Celes Chere, Locke Cole (Celes/Locke, Balthier/Celes/Locke)
Rating: NC-17
Contains: Canon-typical violence, explicit sex
Wordcount: 13,727
Notes: Yeah so I started this in 2009, and then it just sat there for fifteen years, but the idea never left me alone, so here we are. This crossover places characters from FF6 into Ivalice as though they have always been there; personalities remain intact, although backstories may have altered.
Beta: none
Summary: One of the most valuable lessons a young sky pirate will ever learn is when it is wisest to simply cut his losses and walk away.
Chapter Index
"He's going to try to stab you in the back," Locke said.
Celes didn't look at him. "He won't."
"That accent is one hundred percent Archadian noble. They don't like to lose."
"He knows perfectly well you cheated," Celes said. "Fortunately for him, we're doing it for his benefit."
"And ours," Locke said.
"We aren't altruists." Celes walked through the door of the armory shop without looking back at him. Neither, she admitted to herself, were they nearly as rough as some of those who made home port in Balfonheim. Had she not recognized the design of the would-be pirate's very pretty toy and told Locke to rope him into a game of cards, she had no doubt someone else would have done the same to take the ship rather than a month of his service, or skipped the entire charade and stabbed him to claim it. She'd left her service to Archades far behind, but they still made the best airships. Rozarria couldn't come close.
She perused the racks of weapons and armor, but there was nothing she had the training for that was an improvement over her existing kit. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Locke eyeing the daggers in a way she knew only too well. She delivered a subtle kick to his ankle on her way past. He covered his reaction well, only hissing out his breath, and followed her outside.
"Was that really necessary?" he asked.
"You tell me." She turned to the aerodrome.
He muttered something in an obscure dialect of Archadian—whether because he'd forgotten it was her native tongue or he didn't care, she wasn't sure—and jogged to keep up. "Think he's already fled the coop?" he asked.
"Him? No. There's too much honor and service still in him, right now." She walked into the aerodrome and turned to the left. The glittering experimental Archadian ship sat there, winking in the fading afternoon sun. The hatch was closed. She dodged a moogle who had designs on her purse, ducked under a bangaa carrying too many sacks at once, and made her way across the aerodrome to the ship. The name Strahl was painted in curling script across the side, fresh and new. She wondered if the boy had painted it himself after his theft.
She stepped into the shadows to wait, Locke joining her to lean against the wall and study the flow of traffic in the aerodrome. As hunters without a ship of their own, most of their downtime was spent looking for a quick way to wherever their next mark might be found. A month with their own pilot—however unwilling—was the kind of thing they never had access to. She fully intended to make the most of it.
~*~
Balthier stood in the shadows of the aerodrome, willing his heart to beat more slowly. He had purchased an array of curatives from the apothecary, particularly the antidotes that Celes had recommended, and two different element crystals to place in his pouch of shot should the mark prove weak to either. He had not been able to find the swagger to stroll back to the hunt board and check the posters.
Now he had to go act insouciant and clever, as his role demanded, as his pride demanded, all while figuring out how to get this bet back on even ground and not get himself killed in the hunt.
Nothing to it, really.
He straightened his shoulders and strolled toward the Strahl, where he saw the gleam of gold and black armor in her shadow. Celes waited beneath one of the wings, in a stance that suggested she had spent time in someone's military. She glanced at him as he approached, her expression neutral.
He shielded the lock panel with his body; hearing footsteps approach, he shifted his left hand over it as well as he tapped in the code to unlock the airship. With a soft whisper of air and the slightest shimmer of metal, the door slid open, and he pulled down the steps.
He turned to Celes and put on his most charming smile. "Welcome aboard the Strahl," he said, though he itched to leap in and fly her away, where she would remain his alone.
A pirate, he reminded himself, keeps his word.
She nodded and gestured for him to precede her. It was not unreasonable, he supposed, given how some of Balfonheim's residents likely would react to losing. He skipped up the steps two at a time, clicked the lock into place on the captain's cabin, and turned to see Celes standing in the narrow hall. Behind her stood a thin man about her height, who looked vaguely familiar. Balthier stepped closer, cautiously, and studied the man's face. Thin, with high cheekbones, gray eyes, and short blond hair, under a blue bandanna. The scar that had twisted half his face was gone, and the hair was several shades lighter and quite a bit shorter, but it was definitely him. Not the same blue bandanna he'd been wearing before, but— "Algus," he said.
He grinned. "Locke, actually."
Balthier looked him over. He wore a blue vest decorated with dozens of beads and dangles, sturdy boots, gray-blue pants, and a fair amount of jewelry. A well-made dagger hung at his side. "I take it you're a hunter when you aren't a card sharp?"
He looked slightly ashamed for a moment. "Listen, better me than most of the sharps in that tavern," he said. "We're just looking for a partner on a hunt, not to take your airship forever."
"Somehow," Balthier said, "I cannot find that especially comforting."
"Enough." Celes shook her head. "Let's talk about the mark."
Algus—no, Locke—sighed dramatically. "Got anywhere we can sit, or are we gonna just stand here in the corridor?"
Balthier stepped back and opened the door leading to the cockpit and cabin. He took the pilot's seat and turned it to face the passenger spaces. Locke sprawled across two seats, playing idly with his dagger. Celes sat perfectly upright across the aisle from him.
"What happens," Locke said, in a tone somewhere between rhetorical question and obnoxious professor with a trick question, "when an ochu decides its favorite food is a particular variety of poisonous snake?"
Balthier began to understand why Celes had recommended he stock up on antidotes. He began to think he had not purchased enough. Ochus took on traits of the plants and animals they fed upon, in addition to their own entirely sufficient arsenal of attacks.
"And where is this particularly poisonous plant?" He liked the way the alliteration tripped off his tongue; suitable wit for a sky pirate.
"It has been reported at the edge of Golmore," she said.
That made sense. Golmore was a place of deep mystery and deeper forest. He considered the known areas of Jagd, and the patrol path of Archadian airships. "Very well," he said. He spun the pilot's chair, examined the panels before him. Balfonheim didn't have strong checks on people entering or leaving the aerodrome. He plotted the course, hands moving easily across the instrument panel. His first venture into the pirate city might have ended in moderate disaster, but this, at least, he was entirely confident in.
"Strap in," he said, and without looking to see if they complied, he gently pulled the throttle. The engine sang and the airship lifted into the air, through the open roof of the aerodrome and into the crowded skies above the city. Balfonheim had nothing so organized as air traffic control, so it took all of his attention to dodge the skiffs and ships that darted like dragonflies in and out of the aerodrome.
When they were safely out over the ocean, the Ridorana Lighthouse a distant shadow on his right and Balfonheim shrunk to the size of children's toys to his left, he took a deep breath and rolled his shoulders. The Strahl would certainly handle most impacts, but without access to a full Archadian laboratory, he'd have trouble machining all the parts for her or have to pay out of pocket for a moogle, and not having made a score yet, he hadn't the Gil for it.
He turned to see Celes and Locke strapped in properly. Celes was looking out the window at the sea spread beneath them, a faint smile touching the very edge of her lips. Locke was walking a pair of coins back and forth across his knuckles, metal flashing in the sunset light.
"Does this creature only come out at night, or will we be making camp?" he asked.
"Camp," Celes said decisively.
Balthier turned back to the controls and turned toward Golmore.
~*~
Golmore Jungle seen from above in daylight was a vast sea of every shade of green, a rippling landscape of leaves and branches that hid all manner of dangerous flora and fauna. When they arrived in full darkness, it was a different shade of dark from the sea, highlighted in eerie blue from the fiery cat fiends that roamed its understory.
Rather than land, Balthier consulted a map of wind currents and dropped the sky anchor off the coast where the wind should be steady and in a single direction, the calm zone between a mass of perennial turbulence and wind shear on one side, and the deathly stillness of jagd on the other. When he released the controls and flexed his hands, he felt a rill of pain race up and down his arms as the tension eased. He got to his feet slowly and stretched, which led to him turning around to see his two unwelcome passengers.
Celes barely seemed to have moved throughout the whole flight. In the dimness of the cabin lights, her armor looked darker, and her hair lighter. She turned to look up at him. "Has this ship a galley, or are we on field rations?" she asked lightly.
So she had been a soldier, then. "There's a galley," he said. "I am an indifferent cook at best."
"I can manage." She stood and stretched. "If you'll permit me."
He gestured and nodded. He was still feeling more than a little resentful, and didn't like having to give over his own ship, but he thought that the less he spoke, the less struggle there would be. He had gotten more than a lifetime's worth of shouted abuse in the Akademy; no need to invite more here.
He did follow her into the galley, where she rummaged in the firmly latched cabinets. To the staples he kept there, she added cold roast chicken that she'd brought aboard in a box sealed with an ice stone inside, and soon enough there were three plates of bread, chicken, cheese, and tiny Balfonheim cherries, meltingly sweet on the tongue but with a savage kick of sourness at the end. Balthier found himself once again sitting at a small table with the two of them, this time with food instead of cards spread out.
He held his peace until halfway through the meal, when his curiosity overwhelmed him. "Why cheat me?" he asked. "Surely there were dozens of others."
"Balfonheim gets dozens of would-be pirates every week," Celes agreed. "Most don't last three days. They start the wrong fights out of carelessness or brashness, or they fail to hold on to their purses, or they find the pirate life is much less romantic than they dreamed, and they crawl back home."
She didn't look at him, but he had the uncomfortable feeling she knew his entire story. Would he never leave his father's name behind?
"You, though," she continued, "you were different." A smile curled one side of her mouth. "Very few of those aspiring pirates arrive with an experimental airship prototype that's the best to come out of Draklor in a decade."
He'd thought of stopping off in Tchita to do something to cover the Strahl's unique shape, but the problem was that every aspect of her engineering flowed into all the rest. If he tinkered with the shape, she would lose her speed and maneuverability, just like a man shoved into heavy armor when he'd trained in light cloth.
"What makes you say Draklor?" he asked, for lack of any other response.
The smile spread to the rest of her mouth, but she said nothing.
He raised an eyebrow. Draklor was famously hard to break into; its airspace was more heavily patrolled than any other part of Archades but the palace, and getting there on a cab required access to the highest echelons of Archades' military or nobility. But talking about that would open up too many questions about his own familiarity with the place. He assumed she had calculated just such an outcome.
He did not care for the taste of crow. A life of sky piracy had seemed easy enough to claim; most of the skills he required—piloting, combat, and reading other people—were the same as those taught at the Akademy and used by the Judges, an irony that did not escape him. Yet for all he had soared through the Akademy with very little effort, his attempt to shift had thus far met with disaster.
"I assume you know how to use that gun," Celes said. Her tone was not unkind.
"I do." He accepted the change of topic with as much grace as he could muster.
"Then I think we'll do just fine." She ate the last of her chicken. "Most sky pirate adventures are hunts, not seizing ships. Exploits are more dramatic, and less likelihood of Archades and Rozarria destroying entire cities to get at someone who touched the wrong ship."
"Though in this one, we're like to be targets," Locke said.
Balthier shook his head. "I left her tracking radio somewhere far from here, and she has stealth features." Speaking of that, he'd best enable them.
He rose from his seat and gathered the plates. It was the work of only a few minutes to clean up, and then he left the two of them sitting silent in the galley while he went to the control panel to flip the stealth features to active. To the best of his recent knowledge, Archades had no military plans in the area of Golmore, but it was best to be cautious nonetheless.
That night he heard muffled sounds of lovemaking from the other cabin, and pulled his pillow over his head to try to drown it out.
Chapter Three
Rating: NC-17
Contains: Canon-typical violence, explicit sex
Wordcount: 13,727
Notes: Yeah so I started this in 2009, and then it just sat there for fifteen years, but the idea never left me alone, so here we are. This crossover places characters from FF6 into Ivalice as though they have always been there; personalities remain intact, although backstories may have altered.
Beta: none
Summary: One of the most valuable lessons a young sky pirate will ever learn is when it is wisest to simply cut his losses and walk away.
Chapter Index
"He's going to try to stab you in the back," Locke said.
Celes didn't look at him. "He won't."
"That accent is one hundred percent Archadian noble. They don't like to lose."
"He knows perfectly well you cheated," Celes said. "Fortunately for him, we're doing it for his benefit."
"And ours," Locke said.
"We aren't altruists." Celes walked through the door of the armory shop without looking back at him. Neither, she admitted to herself, were they nearly as rough as some of those who made home port in Balfonheim. Had she not recognized the design of the would-be pirate's very pretty toy and told Locke to rope him into a game of cards, she had no doubt someone else would have done the same to take the ship rather than a month of his service, or skipped the entire charade and stabbed him to claim it. She'd left her service to Archades far behind, but they still made the best airships. Rozarria couldn't come close.
She perused the racks of weapons and armor, but there was nothing she had the training for that was an improvement over her existing kit. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Locke eyeing the daggers in a way she knew only too well. She delivered a subtle kick to his ankle on her way past. He covered his reaction well, only hissing out his breath, and followed her outside.
"Was that really necessary?" he asked.
"You tell me." She turned to the aerodrome.
He muttered something in an obscure dialect of Archadian—whether because he'd forgotten it was her native tongue or he didn't care, she wasn't sure—and jogged to keep up. "Think he's already fled the coop?" he asked.
"Him? No. There's too much honor and service still in him, right now." She walked into the aerodrome and turned to the left. The glittering experimental Archadian ship sat there, winking in the fading afternoon sun. The hatch was closed. She dodged a moogle who had designs on her purse, ducked under a bangaa carrying too many sacks at once, and made her way across the aerodrome to the ship. The name Strahl was painted in curling script across the side, fresh and new. She wondered if the boy had painted it himself after his theft.
She stepped into the shadows to wait, Locke joining her to lean against the wall and study the flow of traffic in the aerodrome. As hunters without a ship of their own, most of their downtime was spent looking for a quick way to wherever their next mark might be found. A month with their own pilot—however unwilling—was the kind of thing they never had access to. She fully intended to make the most of it.
~*~
Balthier stood in the shadows of the aerodrome, willing his heart to beat more slowly. He had purchased an array of curatives from the apothecary, particularly the antidotes that Celes had recommended, and two different element crystals to place in his pouch of shot should the mark prove weak to either. He had not been able to find the swagger to stroll back to the hunt board and check the posters.
Now he had to go act insouciant and clever, as his role demanded, as his pride demanded, all while figuring out how to get this bet back on even ground and not get himself killed in the hunt.
Nothing to it, really.
He straightened his shoulders and strolled toward the Strahl, where he saw the gleam of gold and black armor in her shadow. Celes waited beneath one of the wings, in a stance that suggested she had spent time in someone's military. She glanced at him as he approached, her expression neutral.
He shielded the lock panel with his body; hearing footsteps approach, he shifted his left hand over it as well as he tapped in the code to unlock the airship. With a soft whisper of air and the slightest shimmer of metal, the door slid open, and he pulled down the steps.
He turned to Celes and put on his most charming smile. "Welcome aboard the Strahl," he said, though he itched to leap in and fly her away, where she would remain his alone.
A pirate, he reminded himself, keeps his word.
She nodded and gestured for him to precede her. It was not unreasonable, he supposed, given how some of Balfonheim's residents likely would react to losing. He skipped up the steps two at a time, clicked the lock into place on the captain's cabin, and turned to see Celes standing in the narrow hall. Behind her stood a thin man about her height, who looked vaguely familiar. Balthier stepped closer, cautiously, and studied the man's face. Thin, with high cheekbones, gray eyes, and short blond hair, under a blue bandanna. The scar that had twisted half his face was gone, and the hair was several shades lighter and quite a bit shorter, but it was definitely him. Not the same blue bandanna he'd been wearing before, but— "Algus," he said.
He grinned. "Locke, actually."
Balthier looked him over. He wore a blue vest decorated with dozens of beads and dangles, sturdy boots, gray-blue pants, and a fair amount of jewelry. A well-made dagger hung at his side. "I take it you're a hunter when you aren't a card sharp?"
He looked slightly ashamed for a moment. "Listen, better me than most of the sharps in that tavern," he said. "We're just looking for a partner on a hunt, not to take your airship forever."
"Somehow," Balthier said, "I cannot find that especially comforting."
"Enough." Celes shook her head. "Let's talk about the mark."
Algus—no, Locke—sighed dramatically. "Got anywhere we can sit, or are we gonna just stand here in the corridor?"
Balthier stepped back and opened the door leading to the cockpit and cabin. He took the pilot's seat and turned it to face the passenger spaces. Locke sprawled across two seats, playing idly with his dagger. Celes sat perfectly upright across the aisle from him.
"What happens," Locke said, in a tone somewhere between rhetorical question and obnoxious professor with a trick question, "when an ochu decides its favorite food is a particular variety of poisonous snake?"
Balthier began to understand why Celes had recommended he stock up on antidotes. He began to think he had not purchased enough. Ochus took on traits of the plants and animals they fed upon, in addition to their own entirely sufficient arsenal of attacks.
"And where is this particularly poisonous plant?" He liked the way the alliteration tripped off his tongue; suitable wit for a sky pirate.
"It has been reported at the edge of Golmore," she said.
That made sense. Golmore was a place of deep mystery and deeper forest. He considered the known areas of Jagd, and the patrol path of Archadian airships. "Very well," he said. He spun the pilot's chair, examined the panels before him. Balfonheim didn't have strong checks on people entering or leaving the aerodrome. He plotted the course, hands moving easily across the instrument panel. His first venture into the pirate city might have ended in moderate disaster, but this, at least, he was entirely confident in.
"Strap in," he said, and without looking to see if they complied, he gently pulled the throttle. The engine sang and the airship lifted into the air, through the open roof of the aerodrome and into the crowded skies above the city. Balfonheim had nothing so organized as air traffic control, so it took all of his attention to dodge the skiffs and ships that darted like dragonflies in and out of the aerodrome.
When they were safely out over the ocean, the Ridorana Lighthouse a distant shadow on his right and Balfonheim shrunk to the size of children's toys to his left, he took a deep breath and rolled his shoulders. The Strahl would certainly handle most impacts, but without access to a full Archadian laboratory, he'd have trouble machining all the parts for her or have to pay out of pocket for a moogle, and not having made a score yet, he hadn't the Gil for it.
He turned to see Celes and Locke strapped in properly. Celes was looking out the window at the sea spread beneath them, a faint smile touching the very edge of her lips. Locke was walking a pair of coins back and forth across his knuckles, metal flashing in the sunset light.
"Does this creature only come out at night, or will we be making camp?" he asked.
"Camp," Celes said decisively.
Balthier turned back to the controls and turned toward Golmore.
~*~
Golmore Jungle seen from above in daylight was a vast sea of every shade of green, a rippling landscape of leaves and branches that hid all manner of dangerous flora and fauna. When they arrived in full darkness, it was a different shade of dark from the sea, highlighted in eerie blue from the fiery cat fiends that roamed its understory.
Rather than land, Balthier consulted a map of wind currents and dropped the sky anchor off the coast where the wind should be steady and in a single direction, the calm zone between a mass of perennial turbulence and wind shear on one side, and the deathly stillness of jagd on the other. When he released the controls and flexed his hands, he felt a rill of pain race up and down his arms as the tension eased. He got to his feet slowly and stretched, which led to him turning around to see his two unwelcome passengers.
Celes barely seemed to have moved throughout the whole flight. In the dimness of the cabin lights, her armor looked darker, and her hair lighter. She turned to look up at him. "Has this ship a galley, or are we on field rations?" she asked lightly.
So she had been a soldier, then. "There's a galley," he said. "I am an indifferent cook at best."
"I can manage." She stood and stretched. "If you'll permit me."
He gestured and nodded. He was still feeling more than a little resentful, and didn't like having to give over his own ship, but he thought that the less he spoke, the less struggle there would be. He had gotten more than a lifetime's worth of shouted abuse in the Akademy; no need to invite more here.
He did follow her into the galley, where she rummaged in the firmly latched cabinets. To the staples he kept there, she added cold roast chicken that she'd brought aboard in a box sealed with an ice stone inside, and soon enough there were three plates of bread, chicken, cheese, and tiny Balfonheim cherries, meltingly sweet on the tongue but with a savage kick of sourness at the end. Balthier found himself once again sitting at a small table with the two of them, this time with food instead of cards spread out.
He held his peace until halfway through the meal, when his curiosity overwhelmed him. "Why cheat me?" he asked. "Surely there were dozens of others."
"Balfonheim gets dozens of would-be pirates every week," Celes agreed. "Most don't last three days. They start the wrong fights out of carelessness or brashness, or they fail to hold on to their purses, or they find the pirate life is much less romantic than they dreamed, and they crawl back home."
She didn't look at him, but he had the uncomfortable feeling she knew his entire story. Would he never leave his father's name behind?
"You, though," she continued, "you were different." A smile curled one side of her mouth. "Very few of those aspiring pirates arrive with an experimental airship prototype that's the best to come out of Draklor in a decade."
He'd thought of stopping off in Tchita to do something to cover the Strahl's unique shape, but the problem was that every aspect of her engineering flowed into all the rest. If he tinkered with the shape, she would lose her speed and maneuverability, just like a man shoved into heavy armor when he'd trained in light cloth.
"What makes you say Draklor?" he asked, for lack of any other response.
The smile spread to the rest of her mouth, but she said nothing.
He raised an eyebrow. Draklor was famously hard to break into; its airspace was more heavily patrolled than any other part of Archades but the palace, and getting there on a cab required access to the highest echelons of Archades' military or nobility. But talking about that would open up too many questions about his own familiarity with the place. He assumed she had calculated just such an outcome.
He did not care for the taste of crow. A life of sky piracy had seemed easy enough to claim; most of the skills he required—piloting, combat, and reading other people—were the same as those taught at the Akademy and used by the Judges, an irony that did not escape him. Yet for all he had soared through the Akademy with very little effort, his attempt to shift had thus far met with disaster.
"I assume you know how to use that gun," Celes said. Her tone was not unkind.
"I do." He accepted the change of topic with as much grace as he could muster.
"Then I think we'll do just fine." She ate the last of her chicken. "Most sky pirate adventures are hunts, not seizing ships. Exploits are more dramatic, and less likelihood of Archades and Rozarria destroying entire cities to get at someone who touched the wrong ship."
"Though in this one, we're like to be targets," Locke said.
Balthier shook his head. "I left her tracking radio somewhere far from here, and she has stealth features." Speaking of that, he'd best enable them.
He rose from his seat and gathered the plates. It was the work of only a few minutes to clean up, and then he left the two of them sitting silent in the galley while he went to the control panel to flip the stealth features to active. To the best of his recent knowledge, Archades had no military plans in the area of Golmore, but it was best to be cautious nonetheless.
That night he heard muffled sounds of lovemaking from the other cabin, and pulled his pillow over his head to try to drown it out.
Chapter Three
(no subject)
Date: 2024-10-02 01:11 am (UTC)(The original starting point for this was the Kenny Rogers song "The Gambler," which is still a favorite of mine, so at least it stayed around in my head.)