21. Friends

Making friends was something that came easily to Vaan. He had had his share of a brutal past, but he'd soon found that the best way to forget was to smile like nothing was wrong. People flocked to him when he did that. It distracted him and helped him to push away the rage to the back of his mind.

In those moments there were many things that he stopped thinking of. The loss of his parents. The loss of Penelo's parents, who had been so kind to him. And the face of his brother on his deathbed as he fervently murmured to Vaan the events that he witnessed with his own eyes, the events that had caused him to be silenced and had cost him his life. Vaan did not understand everything that Reks told him, but there was one name that was constantly repeated: Captain Basch.

Information was hard to get to for a fifteen-year-old, but eventually Vaan wheedled and begged enough for Old Dalan to take pity on him and reveal that Captain Basch had been executed. A part of him had been relieved that justice had been done, but the rest of him was dissatisfied. He had wanted to take Basch's life himself and make sure that the man was sorry for murdering his brother in cold blood. He had wanted to make him taste the pain he had inflicted on others. But it was too late now - a dead man couldn't be killed, and all Vaan could do was simply mourn and live his life.

That lingering dissatisfaction, however, was ultimately what fueled him on his journey with Ashe and the sky pirates. Two years of thinking had made him want to seek the reason for Reks's sacrifice. What was so important that an innocent bystander had to be killed?

When he had first come across Basch in the Nalbina dungeons, Vaan's instinctive reaction was blind anger. He didn't expect to still harbor so much of it, but it was there, and it told him that it was finally his chance to get revenge and lay his bitterness to rest. It felt far too good just to let himself go and let the anger direct his body as it willed. He tried hard not to believe the man, he really did - but Reks's voice in his memories reminded him that he needed to find the truth. Not just for his own sake, but for his brother's, too. After all, it had been Reks who had been the true victim of the deception.

And so it was with great reluctance that Vaan took his first steps down the hard path. He decided that he would find the man who was really responsible for his brother's death. An eye for an eye, a life for a life. Maybe then he would finally be free of his rage.