#bathier

so i read this and...

wait a miNUTE....

Nyrax: I hate working on support shot so much : |

Bathier: What rank are you?

Nyrax: Stupid.

I DON'T EVEN REALLY SHIP THIS I JUST KIND OF WANTED TO WRITE ABOUT HIM SO I PICKED VAAN'S PERSPECTIVE :P 

This is actually really weird and strange but it was fun to write and I do really think Balthier is more suited to water than anything else. Lol.

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He moves like water.

It's strange, Vaan thinks, because the man is a sky pirate after all, spends his time among the clouds like a bird with the wind in his face, his hair, ruffling the perfectly pressed folds of his clothes--he should move like air, wind. He should be a calm breeze when he smiles, making tiny gestures with effortless grace like the faintest current of air catching a leaf, a flower petal; when he's angry, it should be a dervish, a tornado, gusting fury with a spear that whistles through the air and powerful buffeting attacks that beat at his opponents and leave them windswept and breathless. 

But he's not, he doesn't; he is neither of those things, nor any point in between. 

Balthier moves like water. 

His every motion is fluid, smooth and perfect, his body formed of unbroken lines and tremulous grace. Vaan's watched him--it's impossible not to, the man commands his gaze, drawing him in like a whirlpool--and he's seen it, the way everything around Balthier causes tiny ripples in his demeanour, his motions. He shifts constantly, not through uncontrolled whim like the fickle winds, but from purpose; reacting always to every small thing. His arm extends, point of the spear stabbing through the empty ribcage of a skeleton, and the motion is unbroken. A steady stream, the inexorable rush of a river as it carves a path out of whatever obstacle stands before it. 

The calm of a wind is shallow, it's caused by an absence of something, a lack of moving force; when the man is calm, it is anything but. There's a sense of depth to him, skies and clouds reflected on the surface of a perfectly calm pond, undisturbed and unbroken, but there is not telling how far down the depths go, what currents and eddies are swirling there behind his sea-green eyes, churning away at the sands of his mind. 

And when he rages; when he fights, for Fran, for Ashe, for Vaan, it's not a wind, it's a tempest. Raindrops, sharp and cutting, driven against opponents in a thousand thousand angry drops, driving like a waterfall, thunderous and majestic and unstoppable. He moves like rapids, churning about, his feet deft and sure as the water that crashes between rocks, weaving among and then through opponents like they're just so many blocks of stone to be carved through or around but never stopping him. Nothing can stand in his way; he flows through it. 

Then just as fast, like the river, he can be calm again. Obstacles left behind and back in an even path, and his energy carries them all forward, tiny ripples that crest over them and take them onwards with relentless buoying energy. 

Balthier is a rushing river, a laughing brook, a raging storm, a deep churning ocean, a wide unknowable sea.

He is a looming wave that swells in the distance, coming towards Vaan who stands in the shallows with Balthier's curious nature lapping at his toes in the sand, coming closer and larger and more inescapable with every passing moment, until the day it crashes over Vaan, sweeping his feet from under him with an undertow he can't fight, can't resist, carrying him away.