A/N: I first played FFXII last summer and this fic has been in my head since! Originally posted a few months ago, then taken down and reworked since the plot became bigger than what I'd originally planned on and way bigger than my usual style. So for those who read some of the original story- I'm reincorporating the original elements of the plot, just refined and planned everything better!

This is mostly a FFXII fic, but crossover with some lore and characters of FF Tactics (Mostly Alma Beoulve and the Lucavi) since they technically take place in the same world but in different times with FF Tactics being like the post apocalyptic GoTish future.

I'm a fan of character-centric chapters, so each chapter will feature someone different in the forefront but this is overall a Basch fic (as the original protag of FFXII and my favorite it's only fair!) so he'll be starting off.

Anyways, thanks for reading! :)

He ran as fast as he could for her, feet sinking as they struck the ground.

His childhood was a series of brightly lit windows, well kept from the dust thanks to the attentive staff of his household. The bedroom he shared with Noah was positioned towards the sun, so that when the boys slept too late their eyelids turned red from it's rays.

The creases of his mother's forehead became evermore apparent with the absence of his father.

She stood before her little boys kindly exasperated, her hands working at her apron.

Basch didn't realize how hard it must've been for her until years later, to have two rambunctious boys to raise on the diminishing inheritance of their father. Raised in nobility herself, she'd been forced to relieve household staff of their duties and take them on as her own.

"Miss Adalard tells me one of you stole a cake from her display." Almond-shaped hazel eyes passed from one twin to the other sternly, "Which one of you plays a thief today?"

"It was him." Noah accused, promptly pointing a finger in Basch's direction, though he refused to look him in the eye and Basch blinked back tears from shock.

"'Twas not me, momma! I swear it!" The older twin cried, throwing his arms around his mother in desperation for her trust.

He was granted it, by the smooth touch of her long fingers through his hair.

"I believe you, sweet child." His mother's lips carressed his ear and Noah looked to the ground sheepishly, "Noah," She reached an arm to the other boy, pulling them both in against her chest as she knelt towards the floor to hold them, "You must tell me why you did it."

"I-I don't know. I was so hungry! I didn't mean to!" Noah lamented, failing to conjure tears as Basch had.

"You must tell me why you blamed your brother, I mean."

"Because I was scared."

Thier mother held them both for a moment before sitting back, eyes gentler than they had been, though still stern and sad, like they always were in Basch's memory.

"You share the same sweet face, my boy, but not the same soul. You cannot blame your actions on others."

There were certain times of day in Dalmasca when Basch would feel the pleasant warmth of nostalgia for Landis, when the dry desert sky would cast a gentle glow on the land in the evening, inviting a pleasant evening warmth during the day.

Archades however, bore little memory to his homeland and to Dalmasca. The humidity in the air was damp, making winters feel cooler and summers hotter, and the greenery that grew from the trees and came from the ground was more brilliant and colorful than that of Dalmasca and Landis combined.

There were moments, however, when the sun began to sink behind the hills beyond the capital city that the air felt dry for the sheen of sweat upon his skin with the wooden training blade in his hand. These training sessions gave him the opportunity to shed Gabranth's armor and shy away from the world of politics for the time being, a world he'd been all too intimate with for the past two decades.

Lord Larsa was a quick study but he tired too quickly still, and when that happened his technique was clumsy.

Larsa cast his sword to the ground in surrender and leaned forward with his hands on his knees, breathing heavily to catch his breath. A proper blade would've sank it's tip into the dirt with such force, but a wooden blade merely met it's tip to the ground with a thud and bounced from point of impact.

Basch retrieved the sword with his own and tossed them to the bucket with the rest. He turned to find the boy upon the bottom steps of the courtyard with a drinking gourd in his hand.

Basch walked to him and accepted it with a nod of thanks.

Larsa was hardly a boy for much longer, as he'd grown so tall that the top of his head was level with Basch's chin when he stood straight, yet still Basch went much easier on him than he would one of his own men; Larsa's focus would primarily be in audience chambers and the seat of his desk, not the battlefield.

He looked identical to Vayne at some angles, yet hardly at all when one approached him straight on. His features had lengthened and became more angular, and his body was so thin and lanky the way young men grew before they developed any sort of muscle mass. And most prominently, his voice had dropped an octave or two, causing various officials to look twice when they first heard him speak, even now.

"You tire early, milord." Basch told him in a teasing tone, passing the gourd back to the young emperor who drank from it gratefully.

"I lack your endurance just yet."

Basch sank on the step beside him. It would be dusk before long. And from their perch so high above the lower levels of the city they would surely be hearing the nightbugs soon, a sound that was still so foreign to him, but he'd grown to find the sound rather soothing, because it was at night that the trauma of the past crept through his mind so that he'd take any distraction that he could.

"You do have potential." Basch reassured him, squinting in the light of the setting sun, "My ability was much like yours at your age."

Larsa looked at him skeptically. "At sixteen?"

A breeze wrapped around his limbs. "I hadn't quite left Landis yet. Noah- Gabranth and I would spar daily. We planned on joining the miltary forces of Landis like our father."

Larsa's brow furrowed. "But you fled to Dalmasca?"

Basch nodded. "I did. Gabranth joined as planned until they were absorbed by the Archadian Empire."

Larsa sat in silence for a moment. "I suppose I understand that. My brother and I were hardly twins, but we both had to choose our own path."

Basch smiled. It was an appropriate observation. The young lord was always astute in his perspectives of people, especially for his age. For Basch, that sort of thing came with experience.

"Any word from our friends in Dalmasca?" Basch interrupted the reverie.

"Queen Ashe? Her last visit was months ago."

Basch raised an eyebrow. "Surely you have other sources in Dalmasca."

"You mean to say Penelo." A visible blush scattered across his face at a mere utter of the girl's name, "Yes, I hear from her quite frequently as of late. What of it?"

Penelo and Vaan were inseparable from their youth and while Vaan ventured into the world of pirating and womanizing, Penelo stood by his side to anchor him. It was a wonder, Basch thought, because with Vaan's enthusiasm and penchant for danger he should've died a thousand times over by now.

"I was merely making assumptions, milord," Basch smiled at the boy. And with a tone of mockery in his voice, as dry as he ever had been he added, "I've had occasional correspondance with her myself, though not at all recent. She'd likely grown tired of the ramblings of an old knight."

Larsa chuckled, nudging him playfully with an elbow. "You are hardly old, good Judge."

In the hours and days that followed Basch's arrest, he endured torture. It was curious to him, though the thought was only fleeting, that his punishment lacked... lethal measures. He was chained and scourged and cut, always enough to draw blood and induce pain but never quite enough to mortally him, instead imbedding his flesh with a crude patterns of scars that rippled and stained him.

He initially suspected it was to preserve him for a humiliating and public execution. But someone had more insidious plans than that.

He was kept alive in the dungeons beneath Nalbina, suspended in an obelisk and relieved only for a few hours at night to relieve himself and eat what scraps were brought for him. He was purposefully isolated from other prisoners, and donned with a mask of black velvet when the situation called for any sort of interaction with someone other than than Imperial troops.

He was supposed to be dead.

The first week he hovered over a morsel of bread in the chamber, tearing into it by his teeth as his stomach cramped in response.

"Never have I seen such a hungry dead man before. Surely you must be pathetic to crawl from the grave for a crumb of last evening's dinner."

Basch froze in the midst of licking his fingers, pulling his thumb from his tongue and eyes wide in recognition.

He'd known that voice.

"Noah."

The armored figure opened the door of the cell and stepped into the light before him. He looked like more of a demon than a man in dark armor and a horned helmet set upon his shoulders.

"No one knows me by that name anymore, traitor."

Basch squinted in the darkness as the figure removed the helmet and propped it gracefully upon his hip, crouching down to meet Basch on his knees before him, eye-to-eye.

It was him. In the warm light of the cavern's torches a face once identical to his glowered over him.

It made sense then. He'd been framed by a brother wearing his face at the death of a King- his King.

The man who welcomed him in his service with open arms, made him a knight, then a Captain, and he'd died believing Basch's face to be that of a traitor.

His voice was grim. "What do they call you, then?"

"I am Gabranth."

"Gabranth," Basch repeated, trying the name on his tongue aloud, the missing pieces of the circumstances surrounding his framing and capture now becoming clear. "You took our mother's name and murdered a king with it to frame your own brother?"

The strike to his temple came hard and swift, splitting the wound from Noah's sword that already marred his face.

"We are not brothers." Gabranth spat, "And my father was a coward, like you. I'd sooner die than inherit his name."

The weeks turned to months, months to years, and the soldiers soon grew bored of him and had their own ideas for entertainment, pitting him against other prisoners, then giving him lashings for showing them mercy, taunt him with water and force him to drink his own piss.

"You have grown very thin, Basch. Less than a shadow. Less than a man."

Basch groaned, the chains about his wrists wearing true to his taunter's words.

Noah.

"Sentenced to death and yet you live. Why?"

"To silence Ondore," Basch seethed through his teeth, "How many times must I say it?"

"Is that all?" Gobranth sneered before him, and the thinning muscle across his chest spasmed from the tension and malnutrition.

"Why not ask Vayne himself? Is he not one of your masters?" Basch spat incredulously. Although Basch's identity was kept hidden from his fellow prisoners by a velvet hood, and he was forbidden from speaking to anyone didn't mean that he never heard them whisper in his presence, slowly piecing together the politcal machine that kept him here- a pawn cast aside, kept alive merely as a bargaining chip should a particular Marquis step out of line.

Gabranth ignored his retorts, as if single mindedly focused in glee on the news her had come to disclose. "We've caught a leader of the insurgence. She is being brought from Rabanastre. The woman Amalia. Who could that be?"

Princess Ashe was alive.

And within minutes when several Dalmascans and a Viera approached his cage, he desperately spilled whatever information he could to gain their trust.

Ashe resented him, in the still hours of court in her newly resurrected kingdom where the escapades of pirates where droned before her in a matter of minutes. She thought of quick hands and the burn of cheap whiskey in the back of her throat and she felt nothing else.

Balthier was not sloppy enough, or obvious enough, so she dismissed the news with the wave of a hand and resented him instead.

He'd returned the ring to her, on the promised condition that he find something more valuable in turn for her place on his ship.

What was more valuable than the engagement ring of a dead Prince to his bride, who rose from her own speculated grave to claim the throne of her forefathers?

There was no such thing, that was the truth of it. But with every cornerstone that resurrected her home palace, there were echoes of a little girl raised by traitors and knights alike, and she had long tired of being puppeteered.

Surely the pirate Balthier had not found anything more valuable. She knew him by the tired and exasperated glance that he'd given her over his shoulder time and time again that he cared enough that she would know he was alive.

He was not a pile of ashes scattered over Rabanastre. But nor was he hot flesh under her fingertips in a hushed embrace.

Not anymore.

So she turned the ring in her fingers, feeling a pang of guilt that she no longer associated it with her deceased husband, but with the calloused hands that had touched it last before her.

Balthier was alive and well, and he wanted her to know it by a cryptic note and a returned memento.

Or perhaps he found something more valuable.

Basch was eight days from his seventeenth birthday when he rose at dawn and readied his mother's chocobo for the long trek ahead. She was still asleep in her bedchambers and Noah was still asleep in his. Still hungover and hazy from the wine they'd drank the night before, his toes recoiled from the cool stonework upon the floor as he walked upon it barefoot, so as to not raise any alarm.

As twins they had a funny habit of knowing one another's state of mind, so it was under the guise of drunkenness that Basch was able to deceive Noah about his intentions for the following morning.

He hated lying.

But in the morning, when the crows scattered on the freshly frosted ground, Basch walked to his mother's chocobo with a saddle to perform the unforgivable. He stood in his childhood bedroom door way, watching the face identical to his own snore in the grey morning light.

One more time.

"You're no brother of mine."

The seabreeze in Balfonheim shifted abruptly with the tide, and in the night air the water was especially choppy from the impending storm. Storms were indeed as damning now as in the age before airships flew in the sky, causing a rather loud crew to stir in the tavern by the sea; pirates kept in one place for too long meant complications.

"Three days here, three days there." Balthier thumbed the grooves of the table drunkenly. He was giddy, rhythmically drumming his fingers against the surface.

"Balthier!"

His companion showed no sign of alarm for the man calling him out from by the entrance, for she was a Viera, and had seen stranger things in the visions portrayed in the Wood and the mists of Ivalice than a dead man walking.

She'd supposedly been dead herself along with Balthier, after all. Her cool visage unwavering as she replied flatly to her drunken partner, "A day too long here."

He lifted a hand, pointing his finger toward her in a mocking trigger pull. "The alternate route to Rabanastre doesn't suit at the moment."

"Balthier!"

The voice was closer now, and Balthier turned his head toward the crowd of pirates around him. Could do with a proper bath and a wardrobe change, the whole lot of them.

"Rabanastre doesn't suit? Perhaps the eye of the Queen is too keen?" Fran teased dryly.

Balthier snorted, "The eye of the queen hardly needs to see for herself anym-"

"Balthier!"

Fran wrinkled her nose at the intruder now at their table gripping Balthier by the shoulder, not out of disgust, but out of recognition- sun darkened skin and a jovial, deep voice to boot, a third dead man joined them at their table. Balthier's fist raised ready in a retaliatory strike, then lowered.

Her breaths came quick and shallow, skin pale as her flaxen hair lay fanned about her.

Alma.

Basch ran to her, sandals slick on the wet ground of the chamber.

She turned to him, her skin a sickly pale contrasting deeply with the dark red surroundings. Her features were tightened with concern, but relaxed in recognition as soft brown eyes settled on his.

"Basch," She smiled weakly as he knelt beside her assessing her for wounds and lifting her head from the floor, "It's all right now."

"You did this?"

"Don't worry. The blood isn't mine, I did this on my own."

She coughed, and he felt his own blood rush to his chest and tears to his eyes when she recognized the far off look one gave when they were seeing worlds beyond him. He'd seen is in Noah several years before, and in countless men before that.

"On your own?" He questioned her sadly, "You shouldn't have done that."

"I didn't want to be so much trouble..." Her hand reached for him, perhaps to touch his chin, the way she did, then gave way mid-movement and dropped to the ground.

He didn't want to remember her this way. He wanted to recall the glow of the campfire upon her face, the ring of her laughter somewhere behind him, and the coolness of her fingertips upon his bare chest.

No, not like this.

He slid another arm under her thighs and lifted her slowly from the ground, taking reassurance in the continuing rise and fall of her chest. A whisper escaped her lips and he tilted his ear to them.

"What was that?"

She twitched, repeating the whisper in familiar syllables in the damp air. "You should have left me."

His brow furrowed as he recalled how Noah had taunted him before about the consistent demise of those he longed to protect the most.

"I would never."

There would always be chaos in this world, it seemed. There would always be an excuse for war.