Ballister in the opening scenes is so wound tight and so restrained, he puts up with Todd getting all in his space and is the one to hold Ambrosius back and just radiates control and holding himself up to outside standards. even his affection towards Ambrosius is small touches and Ambrosius coaxing him to open up.
and by the midpoint he's just loosened up so much even in the midst of a fight there's a relaxed confidence about him that he just didn't have before that I think comes partly from Nimona's influence and partly from the fact that he's already lost everything he was trying to hold onto with his control and he's already tried the controlled way of getting it back and that didn't work so he's letting himself go back to his core from being a kid that gatecrashed guard training to fight for what he wanted
and it just makes me think about Ambrosius, who is such an exuberant dork when it's just the two of them and prods at Ballister for being mopey/thinky, but who also definitely has some degree of understanding public/private face seeing how he is with the other knights and in the market scene but he's overall a lot freer with his actions.
After everything, will Ambroius look at the person Ballister is now and the person he was when they were together as knight-candidates, and have to think about how maybe that was the happiest Ballister could be under those circumstances but if they'd been knighted and got that conventional happily ever after, even when it was just the two of them and Ambrosius could drop the weight of public expectations, Ballister probably never would have been as confidently joyful as he has the potential to be and Ambrosius would never even have known what they were missing because Ballister had been holding himself in for so long that everybody (including probably Ballister himself) just assumed that restrained was part of his personality.
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