A/N: Hi again! Back with another drabble. As always, this is for the lovely people over at the Aurikku Facebook Group, especially Chibi, Tari and Gining (link in my profile!). Enjoy! :D
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Remember You
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I felt something today that I haven't felt in years: heartache. It was something that I thought time had healed, that the years had turned into good memories. But the flash of a red coat, the glint of a pair of sunglasses...and my heart was breaking all over again, like it did those twenty odd years ago.
It wasn't him, of course, but I still searched the crowd on the street where I had been walking. Just to catch another glimpse, to have my heart speed up one more time in anticipation. It's the way I felt whenever I was around him. When he was alive and we were fighting side by side with our friends to save the world from Sin.
I was so much younger then. Naive, too. What did a girl of fifteen know? I thought I had everything figured out. What with my bright idea to save Yuna and my feelings for a man that was so much older than me, a man that never really saw me as anything other than a little girl. It was stupid of me to even toy with the idea of him and me. But it got me through the hard times we endured. It's what made me keep fighting, what made me smile on that long journey.
The figure in the red coat wasn't on the street anymore, but that was okay. Maybe I'd catch of glimpse of whoever it was tomorrow, or the next day. It was something to look forward to, to make me smile.
I came home and sat at the kitchen table, a hot cup of tea warming my hands. I pulled out the only picture I had of all of us on the pilgrimage, one that had been taken at the Moonflow by a very persistent Hypello with a camera. I was rather beaten up in the picture, having fought Tidus and Wakka not long before, and I looked nervous not knowing the rest of the group very well, other than Yuna. But we all looked hopeful and we were smiling. Well, everyone except Auron. Who knows what emotions were going on behind that cowl and those sunglasses. He was stood in the middle of the group, looking as stoic as ever. Our rock. The thing we clung to when everything seemed lost.
I turned the well-worn picture over and over in my hand as my mind wandered, lost in the memories of our times together. It might have been many years since, but the laughs we shared and the times when we had each others back in a fight seems like it wasn't as long ago as my mind tries to tell me.
But it was and he's gone now. Has been for a long time. I wonder if I'll ever truly be over it. If the day will come when a flash of red in a crowd will not cause me not do a double take, or the glint of a pair of sunglasses will not make my heart flutter.
I'm not sure I want that day to come.
The Al Bhed say "Memories are nice, but that's all they are." I'm not quite sure I believe that anymore.
The memories are all I have left.
~fin~