This was written for a Secret Santa exchange at the BalVaan community last year. I don't think there are any particular warnings for this one, other than the obvious Balthier/Vaan.

Sand shifts underfoot as Balthier walks in their desert child's footsteps and he nearly looses what tentative balance he has attained.

"Careful," Vaan warns cheerfully, spinning around to grin cheekily at him, "You gotta watch it unless you want to end up with your face in the nearest dune."

Balthier has seen Penelo dance on the surface of the treacherous material without much conscious thought, but as for himself, he finds it nigh impossible. The fact that the churl keeps crowing in delight over his misfortune is enough to make Balthier contemplate an "accidental" shooting.

None would blame him, surely.

"Mind your own feet," he says shortly.

Vaan laughs at him before turning to step nimbly around a cactuar. The creature blinks moronically after him, its quills rattling, and Balthier finds himself wishing, idly, that the thief ends up with a derrière filled with spines.

"It would slow our pace, that," Fran murmurs when she notes his stare.

Balthier waves one hand expansively. "It would be worth it, I think," he says, "Perhaps he would stop being so gratified at our misfortune."

One ear flicks at him. Fran says, "You would volunteer to remove them, after," and laughs at him in her silent viera way.

"Naturally." He refuses to be ashamed of his tastes; the boy is gorgeous, for all that he's dirty and loud. Balthier has fond fantasies of stuffing that mouth with a handkerchief and giving those hands better things to do.

Not that he would ever debase himself thus. This fantasy will remain a fantasy precisely because he does not want to suffer the obnoxious consequences of bedding a war orphan.

He looks ahead again just in time to come face to face with said boy. "What're you talking about?" Vaan asks.

"The myriad uses of a cactuar."

"Really?"

"Truly."

"What are they?" Vaan rocks back on his heels and squints up at him. "I only know one."

"Oh? Does it involve quills and-"

"Somebody's butt? Yeah."

"Then we seem to be of an accord."

Vaan blinks, his nose wrinkling. "You guys are so weird," he says. Balthier is opening his mouth to respond (who does this thief-child think he is?) when Vaan leans forward and bestows a quick osculation to his cheek.

It is Balthier's turn to blink myopically. "Is this a Dalmascan pleasantry I am unaware of?" he finally asks. "To kiss at the end of a conversation?"

"Nah," Vaan says, "I just wanted to." And then the churl walks away from him.

Balthier opens and closes his mouth a few times, attempting to come up with a proper response. Surely not? Surely it is not that easy? Vaan is a tempting daydream in the desert, nothing more and certainly nothing less.

He is not a prize Balthier wants to win, precisely, or a treasure to be stolen as Ashelia B'nargin is. There are thousand humes of his ilk, with their dreams of aspirations and their fair faces; Balthier is interested only in the rare and valuable.

Common, though lovely, is not a thing he wishes to take.

"Speechlessness," Fran says solemnly, "Becomes a sky pirate naught."

"Please, Fran," Balthier says, "It is merely the astonished silence of one horrified to the very marrow of his bones."

"Lies, also, are unbecoming."

"Silence would be appreciated, Fran."

The Sandsea is a quaint tavern in a quaint city. For all that Rabanastre is dripping in splendor, it is too common sight by Archadian standards, much like her dusky skinned people. Unremarkable. Nothing to, say, differentiate one sun-kissed urchin from the next.

Yes, and if Balthier keeps telling himself such lies, perhaps one day he will come to believe them.

Vaan stands out like a saurian among the wolves. He's laughing just now, swatting affectionately at the children dipping their hands into his pockets even as he speaks with a petitioner for a hunt. Balthier sips his wine, simply watching.

There have been no overtures since the stray kiss in the Estersands; the churl has not made any mention of it, and Balthier has found himself following suit. He is strangely reluctant, for all that he has no interest in a long term wooing.

"Humes," Fran says, her elbow pressed companionably to his shoulder, "Always yearning for that which is not within their grasp."

"I'm fairly certain the boy would be within my grasp, my dear Fran, if I were to simply reach out."

She makes a faint chittering noise of pleasure and proceeds to ignore him. Balthier rests a temple against his fist and resumes his interrupted Dalmascan watch.

Vaan hands out trinkets to the orphan children of Rabanastre; cactus fruit and sky jewels, feathers and pebbles and the like, all small things that can be secreted into grubby pockets. It is his way of brightening the wartime madness for young ones.

Balthier has never been particularly fond of children, but even he is willing to admit it's sweet. That is, until a small girl comes up to him with a gap tooth grin and clambers into his lap without so much as a by-your-leave.

"Yes?" he queries, nonplussed.

"Vaan says you a nice man," the girl says. She leaves dusty hand prints on his shirt and Balthier thinks, uncharitably, that if he were a crueler man she would find herself on her rear in the dirt for that. He has just bathed.

"It depends on how you look at it," Balthier says. He fetches a handkerchief from his pouch and uses it to clean the distasteful stain around the girl's mouth. Honestly. Growing up without a parent was no excuse for lax hygiene. "I am a very bad man to some."

"Sky pirate," the girl says, "I gotta treasure." She opens her palm to display a murky glass bead and beams expectantly up at him. "Vaan says ya gotta pay for treasure."

"That is the beauty of piracy," Balthier says, aware of Fran's mouth curling in bemusement. "A sky pirate takes what he wants without a worry for funding."

The girl bestows him with another blinding grin. She kisses him unexpectedly on the chin, still beaming, and wriggles off his lap to plant both unshod feet on his table. "Vaan!" she yells, "Vaan, I kissed him!"

"Good job!" There's laughter in Vaan's voice and his face when Balthier leans around the cheeky urchin to scowl at him. Vaan unapologetically waves at him. "Come get your reward, sky-pirate-in-training."

The girl jumps off the table, scrambles over to Vaan, and accepts the handful of beads Vaan dumps into her cupped hands with something like wonder in her eyes. Balthier rubs at the dirty imprint of lips on his cheek, disgruntled.

Vaan saunters over to him a moment later, throwing himself into a chair with his typical lack of grace. He swipes Balthier's wine with a lack of disregard that is galling, and attractive, damn it all. Balthier is still not going to bed the churl.

He is not. He has principles. He refuses to sleep with someone who acts as though they'll not be willing to let him go, come morning.

Fran, damn her, taps her claws against the tabletop and nods at Vaan. "What was that, then?"

"I got her to do my dirty work," Vaan says cheerily. "Isn't that what you're always telling me being a sky pirate is about?" The look he delivers to Balthier is pure coquettish charm, a sliver of grey under dark lashes as he sips wine.

Balthier resolutely tells himself he doesn't notice, nor is he intrigued.

The boy has the audacity to press their mouths together sweetly right after a battle. Balthier finds himself so stunned by the bravado that he has framed the churl's face and slipped him tongue before he remembers that he is not doing this.

That is his story, incidentally. He suspects Vaan's differs significantly, but as Balthier was under the rather regrettable effect of confuse at the time, he sees no reason to take responsibility for his actions.

"You kissed me!" Vaan says hotly.

Balthier ignores the various looks from strangers with a practiced ease. "So you claim," he says.

"I'm not claiming anything! That's how it happened. You can even ask Fran, alright, she was right there! You got hit with the confuse and you came at me and then you kissed me!"

"It is truth," Fran says helpfully.

"Discontinue your helpful endeavors, Fran." Balthier leans against a nearby well and surveys Vaan's red face with what he hopes comes across as aloof disdain. What he is feeling is a decidedly different story, but if you gave Vaan an inch... "Have you considered that I thought you were another?"

"Well, no," Vaan says. Balthier raises a brow, starting to smirk, except that Vaan smirks right back and says, "'Cause you kept saying my name, you know? Unless you know a couple of other Dalmascans named Vaan, but it's not a popular name."

Balthier slits his eyes. "Perhaps I do."

"What is your problem?" Vaan explodes. "I know I'm not royalty or anything, but it's not like I'm that terrible either!"

"One cannot fathom the attractions of the heart," Balthier says, his own sinking in his chest. This is why he had been gratified when it appeared the churl was dropping the matter. There is a difference between reluctance to reciprocate and failure to experience the feelings in the first place. Balthier is feeling. He just wishes he weren't.

When this venture has reached its inevitable conclusion, he does not want to stare perpetually behind him, wondering where this Dalmascan's dreams have taken him. It will not be with Balthier and a part of him already aches at the thought.

He has never found Fran's company inadequate before. The nagging feeling that it will be worse when the churl has become a fully fledged pirate in his own right will not allow him to take the risk now. It is for the best.

"You're not being fair," Vaan finally says. He turns and stomps off before Balthier can figure out how, exactly, a war orphan came out with the notion that life was fair.

It is a good view, regardless, and Balthier folds his arms across his chest to appreciate it fully.

"A sky pirate has no need of fairplay," Fran murmurs.

"Precisely. Thank you, Fran." Fran's answering silence is chilly. Balthier turns to glance at her and holds back a shudder; her nose is twitching with what he can only fathom is annoyance, her back half-turned to him. "Fran?"

"Despicable, that," Fran says, running one fingernail delicately over the tip of her ear. "A leading man hiding from his feelings like an infant coeurl, mewling for its mother. A farce to men everywhere."

Balthier processes this. "You label me craven?" he queries.

"A recreant, yes." Fran turns her back to him fully. "Too cowardly to accept the devotion of a harmless hume-child."

He flounders. He is used to Fran questioning his motives when they appeared obscure. He is not used to her pressing her fetching nose into his personal business.

Balthier latches onto the charge most easily disputed. "Your harmless hume-child has both an extremely sharp spear at his disposal, and a confidant who isn't afraid to brandish her katana at whatever creature has the misfortune of upsetting him."

One of Fran's ears swivels back to point at him. "It would appear an intelligible solution, then, to not destroy his heart."

"Oh, grand," Balthier says, "If it's intelligible."

"You are mocking me," Fran says disapprovingly. Balthier fears that without the full extent of her dark eyes, it is lacking in its usual vehemence; she is still turned away from him, one ear cocked at a disdainful angle.

"Just a bit," Balthier concedes.

The ensuing spat sees to that particular line of questioning. By then, Vaan has returned to them, carrying the spoils of war and resolutely not looking at him.

He is unsurprised when the boy asks to travel with his fellow orphan when again they meet in the Hunter's Camp. Penelo sends him a single narrow eyed glance that promises dire consequences, but that is not the reason his chest tightens unnervingly.

Balthier misses Vaan's footsteps in front of them, the quiet confidence that comes from knowing there was a person willing to throw themselves between you and a monster while you reloaded your ranged weapons. They are two again, instead of three, and it irks.

"Yes, Fran, I know," he says when she glowers at him for complaining.

Fran sniffs disdainfully and says, "Humes."

Vaan throws himself on the ground beside him, heedless of the mud, and says, "I was kind of worried about you guys."

Balthier plucks at his wet shirt. "Oh?" he asks distractedly. His heart is beating a rapid, traitorous tattoo against his ribs. He feels not unlike the characters in the novels Fran enjoys reading in her spare time, with their heaving chests and delicate fainting spells.

Well. Perhaps one of those, if they ever had the misfortune of being coated head to toe in mud. The Tchita Uplands are a cesspool of filth at the moment, the ground muddied from both their own weary trek and the habitual movement of monsters.

"Yeah," Vaan says, leaning on his hands and turning his face up to the sky. The rain makes an admirable attempt to clean the heavy streaks of dirt from Vaan's cheeks. "I figured you guys would be okay, because you were okay before, but I worried anyway. I'm sorry if it got you guys into a tight spot."

"We are well acquainted with fighting as a duo," Balthier says. He watches a clump of mud slough off Vaan's cheek, a feeling he is unwilling to look at too closely welling in his chest.

It is ridiculous, and yet, here he is. He has succeeded in driving off his would be suitor, yet he wants nothing more than to obtain a hot bath, preferably with this Dalmascan seated between his thighs.

The absurdity makes him laugh.

"You okay?"

"Fine, Vaan."

"Alright." Vaan stands; Balthier's heart lurches pathetically, and he has to bite back the plea for Vaan to stay.

This is what he's been reduced to. Leading men should never be in such situation as these, though he supposes pining for a lost love is a common enough story element. He doesn't want a lost love. He wants to not want Vaan.

There is a weight on the top of his head, suddenly, and hands bracing themselves against his shoulders. Balthier tilts his head curiously, hoping rather despondently that it is not an attack by Seeq pirates, and finds his eyes stung by mud and hair.

Blond hair. He freezes.

"Just so you know," Vaan says into his hair; Balthier can feel his lips moving against his skull, "I'm going to keep chasing you. I don't give up on stuff I want."

Balthier's hands twitch in his lap. "Reasonable enough," he murmurs. "I shall endeavor to run faster." He doesn't mean it. Balthier's fairly sure Vaan knows it as well, as the hands on his shoulders tighten and Vaan rubs his cheek against his hair with a sigh.

"Nobody likes a tease, Balthier," he says. One of his hands disappear momentarily, and then Balthier finds himself with a face full of cold, wet mud. The hand grinds it in for good measure as he squawks in a manner more suited to a war orphan than a sky pirate.

Vaan runs laughing from him, slip sliding in the muck as Balthier makes his way laboriously to his feet.

"I'm afraid I need to execute your companion," he tells Penelo when the boy has the nerve to attempt to hid behind her, still cackling his head off.

She smiles. "That's alright," she says, ducking to the side and shoving Vaan out from behind her in one smooth motion. "He probably deserves it."

"Indubitably."

In Archades proper, Jules takes him aside and says, "You'd do best to keep your Dalmascans near someone, how shall I say this? Beefier. Archades has a lucrative market for exotics."

"I wouldn't have known," Balthier says, arching his eyebrows pointedly. He grew up in this snakepit. He knows just what his countrymen get up to in their leisure time. "And what price do I owe for such information?"

"Ach," Jules says, waving his hands, "What's a chop's worth of information between two friends, eh?"

"It's certainly not worth the blackmail that's to follow if I don't pay now," Balthier says. He drops a chop into Jules's waiting hands, parting with the inlayed wood with a mental shrug. His plans do not include staying in Archades long enough to need the amount he's amassed.

Easy come, he thinks ruefully, easy go.

"Someone wanted to buy me," Vaan informs him when he rejoins their party. The princess is huddled in a corner giving Archadians a look of arch offense, but Vaan is trying badly to stifle a smile. "Migelo'd roll over how much they offered."

"And he thought you'd never amount to anything," Penelo says solemnly, then bursts into giggles quickly muffled by her hands.

Vaan nudges his shoulder against Balthier and lets his smile slip free. "Would have amounted to ten thousand gil if I said yes," he says. It's not quite a brag.

"You refrained, of course."

The look he gets asks him plainly if he is mentally deficient. Vaan does not respond verbally at first, choosing instead to press a quick, disgustingly wet kiss to Balthier's nose. "I'm really not into Archadians. Too snooty, you know?"

"If I were to mention my nationality, you would...?"

Vaan's eyes light up. "You're a sky pirate," he says, "Not a member of the Empire."

Balthier knows he should be feeling the need to wipe his nose off. It's foul, for one, still slightly damp even after Vaan has turned away to quarrel with the good captain over the price of carnal servitude. For another, he now has a handful of ardents staring speculatively between him and his Dalmascan entourage.

He has given up on arguing with Vaan over such displays for a reason, though, and wet though it may be, he does not want to send the wrong message by wiping it free. What business is it of him if his countrymen think he has a harem of young, nubile desert people?

It's only afterwards that Balthier is forced to concede that his plan may not have been the best. He has a handful of kisses from Vaan, most of them in particularly chaste places, and he is still pining like a heroine instead of the leading man he is.

Fran greatly enjoys laughing at him when he brings it up. "And so discovers, the coward does, why his trepidation was greatly misplaced."

"That is not supportive, Fran," Balthier chides gently. He changes the bandages on her legs with careful hands; she is healing, make no mistake, but it will be weeks, even with Mist, before she is mobile.

"Would you rather I chastise?" Her eyes sparkle in the dim light, though Balthier thinks uneasily that it might just be fever. "I could say I knew better."

"I would rather you were supportive of my impending crisis."

She drags a clawed hand through his hair, smiling when he looks up at her. "Too late," she says, "You lost sympathy months ago. Your hume-child rolls his eyes behind your back, did you know?"

"I knew," Balthier says. He scrubs his hands against the sand to remove the blood. "Hard not to, when the boy is anything but subtle."

"Oh, and so subtle is the sky pirate, scrambling away from his ardor with due haste?"

Balthier shades a hand against the setting sun; Rabanastre is not even a faint outline in the haze of late evening sunlight. "Scrambling towards, now," Balthier says. "Like a whipped mongrel. It's shameful."

"No shame," Fran says, "Unless you assign it. What will you do?"

That is the question, after all. He is still a sky pirate, though he must trek through desert and illness to reclaim his ship. Vaan is still a young aspirant thief with a taste for freedom, though now he has a ship to find it on. It would be a simple thing to say that they will travel together, three (or four) sky pirates instead of merely two.

But Balthier is particular about the Strahl and Vaan wants to reach his dreams himself.

"Perhaps it is best this way," Balthier says, and is totally unprepared for Fran's vicious smack to his cranium. "Ow, Fran!"

"Are all humes as wont to stupidity?" she asks peevishly. "Vaan has coddled yours admirably."

"I'll not hold the boy back!"

"Still so frightened of failure, more like."

"Dammit, Fran!"

In the end, they take back the Strahl, and leave behind a proposition. Fran sighs while he pens it. Balthier ignores her, for the most part, and sternly tells his internal organs to behave themselves. He knows Vaan. He'll come.

He isn't disappointed.

"I knew you guys were alive," Vaan exclaims. He's smiling as he says it, creeping steadily into Balthier's space like if he does it slowly enough, nobody will notice. It's an old habit by now, one that Balthier is gratified to still see, a year later.

"I daresay we're hard to kill," Balthier says.

He's expecting the sudden lunge into his person and feels Vaan startle when he returns the embrace. He folds his own arms around Vaan's waist, noting with slight shock that the boy has grown. Vaan is still shorter than he, but it is a diminished difference.

Balthier had not made a habit of embracing Vaan, before, but he clearly remembers looking down into serious eyes as he patted the churl's chest in parting. Vaan's head still must tilt to look him full in the eyes, but it is a slighter, gentler incline.

He fits better now.

"This is weird," Vaan declares into his shoulder.

"Agreed." In truth, it is slightly strange. He is used to eeling out of the boy's arms, not relaxing into them. Balthier hooks his fingers in the back of Vaan's vest. "Though a vast improvement over past encounters, to be sure," Balthier says. He gets a mouthful of slightly sweaty hair for his trouble.

There is a reason he is against cuddling.

Penelo slaps Balthier on the shoulder as she passes the both of them, granting him a small smile when he looks to her. "He was insufferable on the way here," she says. Her voice deepens comically. "'I knew they were alive this whole time! I knew it. I told you, didn't I, Penelo? Do you think Balthier still likes me?' It was kind of pathetic."

"I did not ask if you still liked me," Vaan mumbles into his shirt.

"Might as well have," Penelo says brightly.

"Balthier as well," Fran confides.

"That's because he's stupid," Penelo says. "Do you think you can help me while they do their stupid sneak attack thing? There's this one spell that's giving me trouble."

The women wander off with their heads pressed together, Fran stooped to listen closely. Balthier reluctantly lets Vaan go, stepping back once, and then again when it looks like he's contemplating more hugging. Vaan beams at him regardless.

"Hey," Vaan says, "If I try to kiss you right now, are you going run away again? I was getting kind of sick of having to figure out ways to get past your guard."

"The child was particularly inspired," Balthier concedes.

"She was really proud of herself." Vaan sidles closer again, his hands lifting to touch the sides of Balthier's neck. "That was a no, right? It sounded like a no to me."

Balthier kisses him. Vaan's mouth immediately softens against his, awkward, and Balthier finds himself wondering incredulously if this is his first kiss. He tilts his head and places a hand on Vaan's jaw to encourage him to do the same.

Vaan smiles against his mouth, huffing laughter, and he finds himself doing the same. It is not the best kiss Balthier has ever participated in. All the same, he thinks, touching the tip of his tongue to Vaan's lower lip and feeling him still, there isn't a person in the rest of Ivalice he would rather be doing it with.