She was like salted soil.
Grey, drifting. Once a place for seeds to plant, once a place to cherish, nourish, grow. Now she was like sand, and being around her felt like being one of those annoying bugs that hopped and leapt and burrowed through the endless, shifting dunes - never finding a place to rest.
Sometimes, she moved her glass eyes towards him.
Sometimes, he swore she was even looking at him.
"Hey, Yuna," he would keep on saying, waving his hand in front of those empty marbles that would focus on the dust on his shirt and nothing else. "You're in there, right?"
Sometimes, she'd even croak a little. Choke something. She'd just go ahead and open those little petal lips and out would come things that he swore were words. Swore they had to be words, because otherwise, it was just the rattling of her long dead cage and he couldn't handle that.
Her skin still felt soft. Even when he held her back, clung onto her waist, rested his head on her cold, unmoving shoulder. She'd just stare ahead with those empty, unseeing marbles - and he wondered if she was just seeing into another dimension. Another realm. Yeah, that had to be it, he'd think as his chin dug into her shoulder and his red eyes stared at the wall she should've been looking at. She was just seeing what the fayth could see. Just seeing what he couldn't.
That was it.
That had to be it.
"Well, what's so exciting about that world, anyway? Come on, Yuna. We still have plenty of fun stuff, here!" He pulled on her dead arm and she'd walk without protest, without a hint of anything. She'd go to the beach with him. She'd stare straight through Kimarhi and trip up in the snow, lie there in the sea of ice and drown if he let her. She'd sleep at the blitzball stadium and drool over her ill fitting clothes in the restaurant.
He'd taken her down to the beach more than once. Wakka had been there, but Tidus knew he found it hard to deal. He liked it best when the sunset came rolling in and the clouds turned pink and red and black, and the other guys had gone back home for dinner. At least then, he could be alone with Yuna.
Or alone with himself, depending on how you looked at it.
"I bet you remember this, don't you?" Placing the ball in the sand, Tidus leapt into the air, kicking it far off into the distance. "Jecht Shot Mark 3, right?" He'd pump his hand against his chest, and she'd watch the horizon glow.
"Too bad we'll never get that ball back, huh?" he laughed, patting her on the shoulder before settling in the sand with her. "Wakka'll kill me."
She blinked. He watched her, and tried to smile.
"Yuna, you've got to wake up, come on."
And no matter how often Rikku would pat him on the back and shake her head, no matter how often Lulu would rasp in his ear that this wasn't the life Yuna would want him to live (the life she gave up for him, was how she'd word it, and Tidus would kick the door and screech that she wasn'tdead and wonder how Lulu of all people could just give up on her like that) - no matter how often he felt like just leaving her to drown in the bowl of porridge she'd let her head fall into, he wouldn't leave.
He wouldn't.
One day, he woke up to find her nowhere near his side. Jolting to his feet, he ran circles round the house, calling for her, pleading for the voice that never, ever answered.
He found her by the beach.
Seaweed knotted up her feet. Sand was bubbling in the edges of her lips.
She held a blitzball in her cool, dead hands.