Star-Crossed, Star-Misled

Carvallain had once imagined himself a mathematician. As a boy barely higher than his uncle's knee, he had clung to the man's heavy robes with one tiny hand as he went about his business in the Observatorium, demanding to be shown this or that when something strange or particularly shiny caught his eye. His uncle had been much more indulent then--far more than his own father, though Carvallain was certain there must be woolly crocs in the rough Coerthan wilds that looked after their clutches with more feeling than Charlemend de Durendaire. When Carvallain had been permitted to escape his father's sight, he would frequently flee straight to the Athenaeum as well, since it was closer at hand in the city proper, seeking out the quiet company of scholars and star charts. The astrologians there took the boy's presence with a sort of fatalistic acceptance--no one wanted to be the first to deny the son of a powerful man, and even as a child Carvallain had taken care to keep out of their way.

His desire to pursue mathematics was one of the first in a long line of desires, thoughts, and general feelings that Carvallain's father had ground out of him like grime from a rug.

As he grew out of his cherubic childhood, the scholars indulged his whims and meddling less and less, and the seed of kindness that had once been rooted in his uncle's heart withered and died in the unforgiving permanent winter that had swept their lands. It was difficult to bear at first, but soon Carvallain became hardened to it himself--hardened, cold and cynical and cruel as his father before he'd even attained his full height, until disaster had struck and cracked his world wide open.

Now, Carvallain watched the sky with a sextant to chart the course of his ships, and often found himself making calculations of a sort to navigate the choppy waters of the fraternity of piracy, which could in its own way be as dangerous as the open ocean. All pirates--even the ones that supposedly scoured the skies with stolen airships, though Carvallain had never met one of those celestial criminals himself--were at the same time brothers and deadly enemies, and one always had to be careful which side of the relationship one was walking on.

At the moment, the Confederate fellow across from him seemed to think him a friend. He was red-faced, with the build of a country farmhand and the taste to match. He seemed to be in what Carvallain would have once called a "mood", although he certainly seemed to have coin to spare.

Currently, the pair of them were alone in a dressmaker's shop, save for a seamstress's assistant who knew to keep out of the way. This tiny island had been hand selected to serve as a nexus of silk trade, its climate being perfect for the husbandry of moths and worms, and the Confederates had come to control it utterly in the intervening years. Carvallain was here to sell some foreign brocade of tactfully undescribed provenance; the other man (whose name Carvallain had not actually caught, or retained it if he had) was here to buy clothes, and also was beginning to test Carvallain's meager patience.

Currently, Carvallain was calculating how much longer he had to indulge this tiresome fellow to avoid offending the Confederate brotherhood -- shaky allies at best, and given the current conflicts with the Garleans, quite pivotal ones. This man was not exactly highly placed, as far as Carvallain understood such things, but he did command a small sloop that was docked in the harbor, making him marginally more valuable -- and dangerous to offend -- than the average rank-and-file sea dog.

"Took a passenger ship," the man said, when asked where this flush of coin had come from. His Eorzean was almost as awful as Carvallain's Hingan, so between the two of them they were able to communicate by meeting halfway. It was no danger in admitting to piracy here -- everyone on this island, including the demure seamstress's assistant, was a member of the Confederacy, and this was well known.

"Really," Carvallain said, carefully folding the brocade in preparation for its changing hands. It was expensive as all hells--Ul'dahn stock, spun from a rare kind of desert flax and detailed with cloth-of-gold stitching, so transparent you could see right through it in the right light (as was the fashion among the more daring aristocrats there). Some enterprising privateers in Garlean pay had taken it from a merchant barge they'd sent to the bottom of the ocean, and Carvallain had taken it from them. "You don't sound enthused, exactly."

"Well, a solid half our quarry fled." The man turned around and around, trying to see what his gaudy robe looked like from every angle without a reflective surface to catch himself in. "Damned cowards. The crew bailed on their passengers, and one of those was deadly quick-thinking. Some kind of witch, too, I'll gather." He snorted through his nose in mixed derision and grudging respect. "We managed to get one of them--the dumb bastard tripped, if you can believe it."

Carvallain said nothing. Even though his own abduction had been ultimately a cruel kind of blessing, he disliked the practice of taking captives for ransom. It was a great deal of effort for only short term reward, for one, and though Carvallain knew it to be hypocritical of him (or so he imagined his rivals currently rotting at the bottom of the sea would say) he simply didn't have the stomach for it. Stabbing a sword between a fellow's ribs, gruesome as it might be, was at least over quickly.

The man kept talking -- he seemed incapable of doing otherwise. "The fellow looked damnably rich, at least. Travelling light, to his credit I suppose, but you know how it is. You can just smell when someone's got a family with deep pockets." He made a face that had nothing to do with the quality of his new clothes (which was impeccable) or his choice of patterns (which was, to Carvallain's eye, hideous). "At first we thought he might be one of those bookish types from Dalmasca--they still flow in from time to time, after the Garleans burned the place to the ground--but no. He told us he was from some backwater place I've barely heard of. Ishgard, something like that."

Carvallain's fingers stopped tracing the cloth-of-gold lotus flower stitched into the brocade.

"Oh, and he was carrying a linkpearl, too, so we could get our demands out. But wouldn't you know it? The bastard's family refused. Just, outright!"

Carvallain left the brocade on the table and turned around. The quiet puttering of the seamstress's assistant had stilled completely--mundane as her calling might have been, she was a pirate still in spirit, and was more than savvy enough to sense which way a wind was blowing. The stocky fellow in the gaudy coat was not so astute.

"What did you say the fellow was? A foreign royal?"

"Not a royal -- just some aristo. Elezen, just like you, and buttoned up to the neck...actually, quite a lot like you." The man squinted at Carvallain, taking in his features. "Younger by a bit, though it's hard to tell with these pampered types...but that same reddish kind of hair and those long ears." He gestured along the side of his head, in a manner that almost came off as lascivious. "You could be family!" The man laughed at this joke. Carvallain did not find it funny.

Carvallain, who had been tapping his nail idly on his cup, stopped. "His family refused the ransom, you say?"

"That's right. I gave 'em from sundown to sundown to change their minds before I toss the fellow overboard. I almost feel bad for the bastard, you know?"

"Then how," Carvallain went on, "did you come by all this profit?"

The man went silent. The rest of the little shop was utterly still--the assistant had long since ducked into one of her secluded corners to wait out whatever storm was coming.

The Confederates demanded a payment from anyone who sailed their waters. Known as the Ruby Price, it was the cornerstone of the pirate brotherhood and integral to their iron grip on the region. As long as the system was followed to the letter, of course.

The moment stretched out much longer than it actually lasted, and Carvallain's calculation of the situation zeroed out. The click of Carvallain cocking the hammer on his flintlock pistol resounded in the quiet tavern like he'd pulled the trigger already -- as loud as cannon-shot, pointed directly at the man's quivering lip. He stared down the barrel, as though trying desperately to see if the thing was loaded, and if Carvallain had a bluff to call. Unluckily for him, Carvallain had never seen the point of bluffing.

"His father won't change his mind." The man didn't ask how Carvallain knew this. It wasn't important right now. "Take me to your captive."

The man who'd dared to break the one ironclad rule of the Confederacy -- Carvallain still hadn't bothered to learn his name -- led him to the beach, and his boat, without exchanging another word and fled. If the crew was aboard, they kept out of sight. They clearly weren't used to taking prisoners, as they had only a small hold for cargo and barely enough provisions for a skeleton crew of their own; they had clearly been counting on this ransom to come through so they could unload the unfortunate soul as soon as possible, either to his rich relations or his grave.

The prisoner was huddled next to some boxes of some ill-gotten silks destined for the Kugane markets, which Carvallain ignored. At the sound of the hatch being lifted and footsteps descending the stairs, his head perked up, and he blinked and squinted into the sudden light. Carvallain got the distinct impression that the man's vision wasn't very good, which was confirmed when he reflexively reached for a monocle attached to his collar by a thin chain -- a monocle that was all but shattered irreparably.

Carvallain would recognize those robes anywhere -- the robes of an Isghardian scholar of the Athenaeum. The design had scarcely changed in decades, like most things in Isghard he suspected, and the mere sight of it brought back intense memories of the thick wool twisting between his tiny fingers, the star charts glittering over his five year old head. It was poorly suited to the lush, wet weather of the Ruby Sea.

The captive set the broken remains of his monocle onto his face, just below his sharp eyebrow, and tried to assume an air of something like dignity. Though a little worse for the wear, his sharp-featured face scuffed a bit and his sunset-colored hair (darker than Carvallain's own, more the deep bloody orange of the ocean just before nightfall, and in this light almost a commonplace auburn) dirty and disheveled, he did not appear to have been mistreated overmuch.

There was a moment of hesitation, when Carvallain feared he was perhaps recognized, but the other man ruined it by blurting out, "Your coat's a different color than the others." Though he seemed to be attempting to put on a bold face, Carvallain knew a man scared out of his wits when he saw one, and perhaps the foolish observation was a symptom of his fear.

"I'm not a Confederate," he said. "You were on a passenger vessel bound to Kugane when your ship was taken, were you not?"

The prisoner did not answer immediately. "If I may," he said, "am I being rescued, or simply changing hands?"

When Carvallain had first started to suspect the identity of the Confederate traitor's unwanted ransom, he had told himself he would decide whether to be cruel or kind on the way there. Now, face to face with the "foreign aristo" in the flesh, Carvallain realized he still had not decided. "The former," he said. The prisoner attempted to maintain a poker face and was obviously unskilled at it. His relief was nearly palpable, even though he had no tangible proof that Carvallain wasn't lying through his teeth. "The captain demanded ransom from your family via your linkpearl, which I believe was summarily turned down."

This did not seem to surprise the prisoner in the slightest. "I see. Well, I have two linkpearls, actually--one by which I have been in contact with the Lady Le--Ah, my traveling companions, whom I have been assured are attempting to collect me. The other contacts the Athenaeum, so I presume they reached my uncle. He's...a practical sort," he said cautiously. It was clear there was some antipathy between the two, though the captive seemed almost hesitant to criticize the logic of his family leaving him to hang. It seemed he was good-natured straight to the grave, if it came to that, or else his own opinion of himself did not rate much higher than that of his uncle. "In any case, as I said, my companions are--"

"What should I call you?" Carvallain interrupted the man's nervous chatter.

"Ah...er, Janne..." He seemed to be considering just stopping there, but since he was already halfway in he seemed to find going onward as easily as going forward. As it turned out, he was actually not even halfway into his name. "Jannequinard de Durendaire." He spoke with the casual assurance that this name would be meaningful--the tone of someone who had never been anywhere the Durendaire name was not recognized. Carvallain, much more practiced at deadpan, gave no indication it rung any bells. "I think I'm the third in line for the title, actually, so I suppose they don't lose much by--"

"You think?"

"The situation is, ah, somewhat complicated, I'm afraid. The firstborn son has been presumed dead for some time, but my father still clings to a faint hope. His ship was, ah...taken by pirates, actually. I cannot imagine what thoughts ran through my uncle's head when he learned that yet another had suffered the same fate, though I suppose he also couldn't pass up the chance to be rid of me. And besides, he's orthodox. Another son of trueborn blood lost on foreign soil would be quite the political talking point."

This time, Carvallain let Jannequinard talk until he came to the end of whatever he was trying to say--and he mentioned his family would rather be rid of him almost casually, as though the outcome was entirely expected. He cocked his head again, swaying back and forth slightly, and Carvallain realized Jannequinard's nearsightedness must be worse than he initially thought. With the useless broken monocle, he likely couldn't make out Carvallain's features in any particular detail. Of course, he had grown up with his nose buried in books, so that was unsurprising.

Jannequinard would have been a small child the last time he'd seen Carvallain anyway--and Carvallain himself had been far younger than he was now. The chances of the man recognizing him now, after nearly two decades of drastically different lives apart, were perhaps rather slim, but the fact that Jannequinard had long ago ruined his eyesight reading by candlelight made Carvallain feel a touch more secure. The way that Jannequinard talked about Isghardian politics, as though Carvallain was sure to understand what on earth he was talking about with "orthodoxy" this and "trueborn" that, had for a moment made him certain the game was already up, but of course every Ishgardian noble seemed to only barely understand that a world existed where their petty backstabbing was not central.

The silence took only a heartbeat's worth of time to become awkward. "Well, get up," Carvallain said. "It's no business of mine where in line you are for some title, or why they weighed your life worth less than a sack of gil."

That got a bit of a reaction--a small wince--out of Jannequinard. Hearing something stated in plain language, Carvallain had often found, cut more closely than the fact itself sometimes, and perhaps now was no exception. The tiny gesture of hurt stirred some long-buried memory deep in Carvallain's heart, of little Jannequinard pestering him for something or other and being rebuffed with harsh words Carvallain (though he wasn't called Carvallain, not back then) had not really meant, but had never apologized for. The two of them had never gotten on terribly well--and raised by servants to spare their parents the trouble, they saw less of each other than perhaps brothers ought--but Carvallain had never truly disliked Jannequinard. He'd always been something of an emotional boy, easy enough to bring to tears or to laughter--and that did not seem to have changed overmuch in the intervening years. Carvallain had the sense he could make Jannequinard miserable as easy as breathing, if he wanted.

However, he decided that he did not, in fact, want to do so -- at least not right now. Looking into those golden Durendaire eyes (slightly unfocused on account of his blurred vision, but certainly the same striking familial feature that Ishgardian poets had sometimes rhapsodized), Carvallain found he couldn't bring himself to say anything further.

"I would stand, but...you see, I...I fell, and now my left knee will not quite hold weight. That was how I became separated from my companions, you see--I tripped upon the hem of my--"

"Your ridiculous wool gown. Yes, I don't doubt," Carvallain said, dryly.

Jannequinard actually looked slightly offended at this. "I am a scholar," he said, as though that explained wearing a robe to the tropics. "And if you want me to walk out of this hold, I'm afraid I'll have to borrow your arm."

After a moment, Carvallain stepped forward and extended his hand. Jannequinard was not just playing at helplessness--he rose carefully and heavily, pulling on Carvallain's arm with most of his weight and balancing precariously on one foot before he managed to get himself standing. Carvallain, who had dealt with a great many injured comrades in his rowdy and dangerous life, slipped an arm around Jannequinard's waist to steady him and let the other man lean upon him as he liked. Jannequinard was smaller than Carvallain, so it was easy enough for him to serve as his other leg for the moment.

Carvallain might have assisted many a wounded comrade in his life, but Jannequinard had not. He clearly did not usually get quite this close to anyone unless his intentions were intimate, and most especially did not have anyone lay an arm around his waist. The flush on his cheeks was visible even in the low light, and he moved as though uncomfortably aware of both his own body and Carvallain's strength next to him. Jannequinard even attempted to step a little out of sync with Carvallain, to put a hair's breadth more distance between them, only to find it simply made him stumble.

This moment of halting uncertainty, the acknowledgement that there was perhaps something a little intimate, even a touch erotic, about being rescued by a well-dressed, well-spoken pirate (as Carvallain ever strove to be, even if he'd come in a bit brusque) would have ordinarily roused a thrill from Carvallain. Of course, Jannequinard was his younger brother, even if the man himself had not realized yet--or would not allow himself to realize, more like, as he had more than enough circumstantial evidence even in the absence of his corrective lens to guess the truth.

Carvallain held Jannequinard a little tighter for just a moment while he thought about all the ways he might seduce the grateful former captive of a rival, if the captive hadn't been his brother...and then pondered how his father, the old tyrant, might fling himself into the Witchdrop if he knew his long-lost first son was entertaining such possibilities. That father of his, of theirs, who had allowed Jannequinard to pursue that far-flung dream of stargazing only because he was not Carvallain, and thus his lofty ambitions were not worth grinding into dust.

With that in mind, he released his hold upon Jannequinard slightly. "Kugane is still a few days out. I'll take you there, if you like, where you can meet up with your companions. You'll have to bunk with the sailors--or I suppose you could share my cabin. The bed sleeps two, and it should be easier on your injury."

Jannequinard was quiet for a moment; the implication was not lost on him, clearly, but he seemed to be trying to puzzle out whether or not it was a demand. At any rate, it did not seem to deter him too much. "Your kindness is vastly appreciated," he said. Carvallain shook his head.

"No kindness, that," he said. "Seeing you safe to Kugane will earn me a bit of friendship with the Confederate ringleaders, as it happens."

"Well," replied Jannequinard mildly, "I am grateful for it all the same."

Carvallain's current ship's surgeon (a local Raen woman who, unusually for her race, stood nearly six feet tall with a thin barbed tail) only needed a single glance to tell that Jannequinard's knee was not broken, at least, and would hold his weight much better in a scant few days. In the meantime, she scrounged up a length of wood that would serve as a cane; now slightly more mobile, Jannequinard elected to nonetheless to retire immediately to Carvallain's cabin.

The night ahead was set to be clear, with bright stars and vibrant moonlight, so Carvallain had planned to set sail under the cover of darkness, to take advantage of the visibility of the heavens to orient themselves in these as-yet-unfamiliar waters. He busied himself with preparations, hoping it would perhaps clear his head a bit, but of course no amount of simply mulling the wild coincidence of their meeting over in his head would make it any less astounding, nor did any amount of thought seem to lead Carvallain down any path but the one he had envisioned before him when he'd swept Jannequinard out of the clutches of the traitor Confederate.

He'd left the Durendaire name in a watery grave long ago. Jannequinard, in that sense, was no better now than any stranger he might have conceived a fondness for. And yet, they still both remembered the same father, the same mother, the sights and sounds and feelings of a shared miserable childhood.

And, of course, the same blood still flowed in their veins. There was nothing that could change that single immutable fact. That alone should have given Carvallain pause, he thought. And yet, the prospect failed to put him off.

By the time he returned to his cabin, with the sun behind him starting its slow descent below the horizon, Carvallain had determined to treat Jannequinard as he would a stranger. If the result was rendered heinous by their shared blood, then well...to hells with it, he supposed. From what he'd seen of the Ishgardian elite as a youth, and from the gossip that occasionally filtered back to him in his recent travels, it would hardly rank in the worst of House Durendaire's sins.

Carvallain found Jannequinard dressed only in his breeches and shirt, having finally removed the robe that declared him a scholar of some minimal repute. He also seemed to have made some attempt to make himself slightly more presentable, combing back his red hair with his hands and rubbing the grime from his face with a handkerchief. Whether or not he'd done all this to impress Carvallain or out of some sense of personal vanity was uncertain.

Currently, Jannequinard was leaning on the chair in front of Carvallain's desk, admiring the charts and maps pinned to the wooden wall of the cabin and strewn across the top of it. If he was frightened or intimidated by Carvallain, the sight of his most prized map of Eorzea seemed to have banished those feelings entirely.

"Am I mistaken," he said, when he heard the door creak open, "or is this the work of Nunula Nula?" Jannequinard gestured at the detailed lithograph. Despite the circumstances, his voice held a thrill of excitement.

"You have an eye for cartography," he said, coming up behind him. He was taller than Jannequinard by about a hand's span--even though Jannequinard had always been the taller one as a child, Carvallain supposed the gods had been generous to him in manhood. "It is indeed. I purchased it from the woman herself. For a map of Eorzea, no one else compares."

"Ah, I agree, I agree--I've a pre-Calamity work by her atelier, which I went to great lengths to procure due to its reputation for accuracy and detail as well as artistic flair." Here, he gestured towards the fanciful form of a two-headed serpent, a figure that loomed large in the folklore of both Vylbrand and Nula's native Lalafellin islands, whose coils breached the printed waves to break up a blank stretch of uninhabited and untraveled ocean. "But her post-Calamity maps cannot be bought in Ishgard at the moment for any price. And these star charts..."

"Sharlayan," Carvallain said, answering Jannequinard's question before he asked it--if it even was a question. He seemed to know the precise provenance of everything in the cabin. "Expensive to obtain and somewhat obtuse to read, but you'll find no better."

Jannequinard nodded. "You have discerning taste," he said, "when it comes to stargazing." That gave Carvallain pause for a moment, but Jannequinard, as seemed to be his habit, rambled from subject to subject carlessly. "Oh, and--I have managed to contact Lady Leveva, and she is adamant that you be adequately rewarded for your assistance once we arrive in Kugane. She is quite particular about such things."

This time, he did not obscure the identity of his travelling companion -- or more likely he had simply forgot to. Carvallain recognized the name from some venture or other recently in Limsa, and privately wondered if Jannequinard had been attached to her even back then--and if it had been by design or chance that their paths had not crossed. He tugged at Jannequinard's shoulder until he turned around and Carvallain could search his face, but he found there only a look of blithe innocence.

"Who's this Lady Leveva?" he inquired. "Your lover?"

"No--merciful Fury, no--I could--I could be her father!" Something about the phrasing, the instant sputtering denial, struck Carvallain as significant. He raised an eyebrow, and Jannequinard went on. "I...I knew her father, actually. A good man." And a dead one, Carvallain immediately thought. No one spoke that way about anyone breathing. "You...ah, no, it's rather foolish."

"What's foolish?"

"You reminded me of him," Jannequinard said, looking away to avoid Carvallain's searching gaze. "Not so much in appearance, but...he had this way about him. A way of making me feel as though I'd known him all my life, even though we'd just met."

There was a raw kind of grief in Jannequinard's words, ragged and cutting as rusted iron. Carvallain was surprised at this show of feeling to a stranger, and a pirate at that, and wondered if Jannequinard had guessed the truth. Of course, the man was also likely exhausted, and he seemed to be so fond of hearing his own chatter that his tongue seemed to run on its own at times, so it was more likely he simply had poor reign on his emotions. That, too, made Carvallain think of the little boy Jannequinard had once been--sometimes he would grow so excited he would trip over his own words in an effort to get them all past his lips at once. At the time, Carvallain had found his little brother's prattling insufferable. By all rights it should have been even more insufferable in a grown man, but at the moment Carvallain found it charmingly vulnerable. The conversational equivalent, he supposed, of turning away from someone to show you trust they'll refrain from introducing something sharp into your unprotected back.

The distance between them was small enough that Carvallain only had to move but slightly to press their lips together. The gesture came off as gentler than he intended, without as much heat as he felt, so he laid his hand along the inside of Jannequinard's thigh, gloved fingers barely brushing the swell of his groin, to make his intentions abundantly clear.

Jannequinard leaned back against the desk, kissing Carvallain back, and hummed deep in his throat when he felt the other man's hand begin to wander. Idly, Carvallain wondered if Jannequinard actually found the presence of the post-Calamity Nunula Nula map to be arousing.

"Mmm...I suppose not, then," Jannequinard said, when their lips parted. Carvallain cocked his head questioningly. "I...It was a bit of a wild notion, really, but...for a moment, I thought...since we rather resemble each other in coloring, you know, and you're Ishgardian and all--"

"Wait," Carvallain snapped, forgetting in his haste to remove his hand from Jannequinard's thigh. He clenched his fingers tight, drawing a noise more of surprise than pain from Jannequinard. "How in all seven hells did you come to that conclusion?"

"Oh, your accent--I studied in Sharlayan, you see, so I suppose I got used to hearing the differences in tone between my Eorzean and theirs. You have, ah...a touch of roundness to your o's and u's. Faint, of course, very faint, but distinct if one has a discerning ear."

Carvallain, who had been working from an assumption he'd harbored since boyhood that Jannequinard was flighty and a bit foolish, found himself disarmed by this astute observation. He stood still, their bodies pressed together in a manner still utterly unbecoming of two brothers reunited after a long time apart, and waited for Jannequinard to meander his way towards his conclusion.

"I thought," he said, "that you might be him, in the flesh. My older brother, I mean. But if you were..." Here Jannequinard's attention turned to the hand between his legs, his hips tilting up slightly to meet Caravallain's palm. "You wouldn't have done all this."

"What if I am your long-lost brother," Carvallain said, stroking Jannequinard with the flat of his hand through the fabric of his hose, "and I've simply lost my memory."

"Well, I would think the possibility of consanguinity," Jannequinard said, "would give you pause regardless. Therefore, you must be certain you are not a Durendaire."

Carvallain could have laughed. Jannequinard had gotten it completely correct, in one sense--he was no Durendaire, not any longer. He leaned forward, intent on pushing Jannequinard's back against the table, but Jannequinard here made his first gesture of resistance.

"Upon a Sharlayan star chart?" he sniffed. "Don't be barbaric."

Carvallain did laugh then--a relieved, genuine laugh--and steered his younger brother towards the bed where, for the remainder of their journey at least, he fully intended to prove the depth of his unbrotherly intentions.