Disclaimer: Forsooth and woe, they are not mine.
A/N: This is a response ficlet for the fanfic Jack of All Trades by auronsfan (community. livejournal. com/thesecret (underscore) place/46245. html) and won't make a lick of sense without reading that one first. Go read it, it's a short but delectable Tidus/Kairi.
Rating: T
Warnings: Character death!
Summary: It's hard being a hero. It's worse being the ones the hero doesn't choose to protect.
Those Left Behind
© Scribbler, August 2008.
Selphie can smell the blood. It reminds her of the old cutlets the butcher throws out each day, which have gone bad in the heat. Cats and stray dogs often clamour around the garbage cans, fighting over the scraps and tugging everything over with a crash to get at them.
There's no crash to signal Tidus was in trouble, and no angry yowling and barking to bring help for him. There's only Selphie, angry that he missed their study date in the school library, marching along the beach with her fists close to the gently rounding hips that pleased her so much when they developed.
She's growing up, becoming a woman in the fundamental ways that teenage girls do, but she feels like such a child when she sees the incoming waves licking at a pile of clothes and realises it's a body. She rushes to him, ruining her school socks by falling to her knees in the bloody surf. She pulls him up by his shirtfront, reddening her knuckles, but his glassy eyes tell her what her heart already knows. Time crystallises around her, allowing his face to be forever tattooed on the backs of her eyelids. Then it shatters into a patchwork blur of images, sounds and sensations that don't connect into a whole, like a DVD on fast forward, skipping from scene to scene without lingering on the details.
Her scream is heard by everyone who lives close to the shoreline. Afterwards, she's told they had to unclench her fingers one at a time because her grip was too tight, and there was a real risk of her crushing her own thumbs. She sees Wakka at the edge of the crowd, his wide shoulders hunched inward and his eyes shadowed. He looks smaller than he did when she first met him.
There hasn't been a murder on the Destiny Islands in over a hundred years, but there's no doubting that's what this is. It's not like Tidus could've just fallen on his own wooden sword. The fact that Kairi is missing only lends itself to the dark rumours that spread like fire through a dry forest. It must be a foreigner, they say; nobody local would do such a thing. Sometimes they whisper of another two boys, vaguely remembered, who should also be here but aren't.
Selphie huddles under the blanket someone wrapped around her when they led her away from the beach, holding it over her legs so she can't see her stained socks. When Matron, the head of the orphanage finally arrives and holds her, she's unresponsive, instead looking to the doorway of the police interview room and meeting Wakka's eyes.
"He was protecting her, I think," she says when they're finally granted five minutes alone. She's supposed to be changing into fresh clothes, so hers can be used as evidence, but the neat pile sits between them as evidence only of Wakka sneaking in to see her. "It adds up. There were marks in the sand. He was thrown by someone, and then ... then whoever it was … he … oh, Tidus."
Wakka wraps her in his big arms, letting her cry for the first time today. He's trying to be strong for her, but he's trembling too and she knows he's not really as strong as he wants her to think he is.
They're just kids, really. They've lived together since each of them lost their parents, watched each other fall down and helped each other back up again more times than they can count. Selphie remembers Tidus when he was five and got a button stuck so far up his nose he had to be taken to hospital on the mainland; and Wakka at age ten, bombing off the end of the jetty and soaking her brand new yellow dress. She can picture Kairi clearly, sitting on the end of her bed after lights-out so they can talk, and then bouncing back under her own covers at the sound of Matron's footsteps. There are photograph albums at the orphanage of them all – her and Wakka and Tidus and Kairi, the kids who didn't have anyone until they had each other.
They're still just kids playing games and pretending to be grown up, though. Getting your first bra doesn't make you a woman, and a wooden sword doesn't make you a warrior.
But having a shared history makes you family.
Selphie buries her face in Wakka's shirt and lets her stunned grief pour out of her. "… Tidus … Kairi…"
Fin.