* Final Fantasy XII, Reddas/Ashe, sacrifice, "What are you willing to give?" – “Check” Check final fantasy xii Mithrigil Galtirglin
He is congenial, in the fashion that in other men belies concealed derision for others or a vaunting of self. Ashe assumes it to be the latter, in the Pirate King; so much like Ashe’s father, he loves his people, but knows that they exalt him and does nothing to contest their decision. Proud, but not arrogant; surer than any knight Ashe has ever known, if less true. Or true to something within as opposed to without, perhaps.
That latter concept is something Ashe considers entirely foreign.
But it is evident in his smile, over the fractured curve of a stein, draining, the beer within not quite as dark as his skin, the foam not as white as his beard. He marks her looking, lowers his eyebrows in implicit question, and does not take his eyes from hers as he sets his drink back down. She cannot make out the sound of his words, though his voice is low enough to cut; but the motion of his lips is clear, “A word, your Highness?”
“A word,” she repeats, and rises from her chair.
He follows her to the tavern’s check, but she does not look back—in passing, the sounds of coin confirming on glass might have been his. His tread is muffled in the effluence of patrons, in the creaking of her own greaves, in the blast of night air that carries the same sounds but spread wider, dampened by the salt air and the rush of the docks.
“Speak, then,” he says, behind and over her, and now she looks. His blackness is no shadow, no spectre, no armored sheen. And though his expression has lost the congeniality of his demeanor in the tavern, it has not broached the direness of their past conversations. Perhaps this is the reality of Reddas, for all men so great wear such things like snakes do skin and antlions do shells, and reinforce anew.
The water laps against the docks; she looks away, and asks: “I know some measure of what you stand to gain, from aiding me in this. What do you stand to give?”
The question does not tack him aback, at least not outwardly. “The same as you, though you know it not,” he says. “In Ivalice, the greater cause compels, and so the self is forfeit to the age. I make this sacrifice the same as you, as every man to sit beneath his crown, but that which spurs a king does not so me.”
“You took this mantle not to gain—”
“—In taking up this land’s shurocracy, I have absolved a measure of my sins. In relinquishing it, I think I shall manage another dent.” And with that, the return of his tavern congeniality, his broad white smile between whiter tracks of beard. “Now come, your Highness—as words go, do these suffice?”