Heehee.
Yuna can't believe he's gone.
She still remembers his touches, the feel of his hands once he's taken the gloves off, the warm fluttery feeling that is always at the bottom of her stomach when he smiles, the silly laughter fits they always got into.
Why did he have to tell her when he was about to leave? Why didn't he tell her before? They could have done so many things! There were a lot of things she had wanted to say, a lot of things she had wanted to do, but he had only given her hints at what was happening, and she forcefully denied any of the claims that they were insinuating.
She tried living their life as if he would always be there.
And she hates herself for it.
She had taken everything for granted.
Always under the impression that she wasn't going to be the one left behind, and that she was going to be doing the leaving. Summoning the Final Aeon was all that she was supposed to do.
And then the end.
Death.
She would never know what it felt like to do many things.
She wouldn't know what it was to fall in love, the butterfly feeling and the knots in your stomach, the cold sweat your hands got when you were close enough to touch that special someone or the feeling of their lips upon yours.
She wouldn't know what it felt to hate. To hate with such a feeling that it burned the insides. To have a different kind of feeling in the hands, one that made you clench your fists and grind your teeth together. A feeling of disgust at the sight of someone, or something that made you feel like the room had just turned colder once that person entered.
Of course, sadness was a normal part of her life, ever since she was young. She lived with the knowledge that her mother had died, and that her father was soon to follow. Even worse was that he CHOSE to die. But he chose it to make Spira happy. She was young, and as mature as she was for her age, she never escaped the bonds of childish selfishness that had always ate away at the bottom of her gut, the one that made her scream at her father to not leave her behind and to stay with her, to make someone else do it.
And then she chose that path too, because she knew that it was the right thing. She new that her father had done good, and that she was in no position to tell him to leave it up to someone else. The sad smile her father had given her had stopped her yelling at him, but her body screamed to force him to stop, balling her hands into tiny fists that clung onto his robe. She wondered minutely if the children of Besaid felt that way towards her when she left as she waved goodbye.
But then he came.
The golden haired boy from the sea. From Zanarkand.
He was so much like Jecht. And memories of Jecht always brought along memories of Braska, and she always felt like crying, but smiled instead.
First, the sight of him, Tidus, was so saddening to her. The smiling face he gave her, always reflecting the smiling face of Jecht, then her father.
But then suddenly, she didn't know when it happened. He suddenly did not have another face. He was just Tidus. And every time he smiled, she smiled for-real this time. Not the fake smiles she usually had, but a comes-from-the-heart honest-to-goodness smile.
Lulu noticed and she smiled too. A light one, one that showed how much she approved and disapproved at the same time. Because the path she had chosen had no place for love.
But Yuna couldn't help it. She always, 'unintentionally' brushed arms with him, stood by him, tried to trip next to him so that she could latch onto his arm for support. She gave Kimahri happy smiles when he shook his head in disappointment. She remembers how careless she was when she was a child, and she was sure this behavior brought memories to the Ronso.
But she always knew, deep down, that Tidus felt the same way. Whenever she did something, she was always being watched by everyone, but she always felt a pair of eyes burning into her back, as if taking in everything they could, in a manner that felt as if they could never have her. Whenever she turned around, she noticed the few heads turned to her always contained Tidus. Eye contact, and a blush on the cheeks as he turned his head always made her feel like giggling, which she sometimes did when she wasn't really paying attention to what she as doing.
But it hurt her so much that he did not know that her demise was just around the corner. She didn't want to tell him. She didn't want to break his happiness. He was always full of energy, telling them they should do this and that, and if someone told him he COULDN'T do it now, he'd say "after we defeat Sin, we're coming back and doing it then!"
The silent treatment from everyone was just not working for him every time he said that. She wondered why it was so hard for him to grasp that she was going to die. Well, of course he didn't know in the first place, but still.
Suddenly, the realization that she was going to die hit her. She never thought much about it, seeing it was inevitable, but she noticed after a while she would think "I'm going to die anyways…"
And after that night in the water, when she cried and he kissed her beautifully and lovingly and full of apologies and happiness and smiles and hugging, she seriously considered not going with the pilgrimage. She didn't want to, she really, really didn't want to. All she wanted was to stop and get married, with Tidus, and have a family, live happily, just like in those fairy tales.
But Spira was not a fairy tale. Sin was always there. There would be constant fear of Sin, and that he would kill you when you weren't looking, and not just you, but your family and friends and everything precious.
And she remembered why she was on her pilgrimage.
And she remembered why she had to always smile.
They found out it was fake. It was unreal. Yunalesca had betrayed all that was holy. The scriptures were all lies! Yevon was not the god they thought he was, and the final summoning was a joke.
Yuna hated Yunalesca with all her might at that moment. Not only had this woman led her father to death, she had also lead Tidus' father to something worse than death, and Auron to something close to death. She had inherited her name. And she felt sullied. She felt unclean, as if all the horridness that was Yunalesca might rub off on her because she had her name.
Well, at least she didn't have to die anymore, she thought mournfully as she stood on the airship.
Rikku, her wonderful cousin, with her wonderful uncle, Cid, who would always be there to help her. They were risking their lives to help her. It was not just Yuna against Sin, it was Spira against Sin.
And during all of this, she still had not done anything. She slipped her hand into his every once in a while, and he squeezed it every time.
She wanted so bad to just jump on him and to kiss him fiercely, to rip his clothes off and to just hold him to her forever and ever, because she wasn't going to die, and she was going to be able to stay with him, and it was the most wonderful feeling she had ever experienced.
But after getting into Sin and fighting Jecht, and killing Yu Yevon…
He told her… He would not be able to show her Zanarkand.
Even if those words had no real meaning, the effect was all the same.
She had a feeling of having a lead-weight in her stomach. Her eyes opened wide and her heart crushed.
"No…" She murmured, shaking her head furiously. She was NOT going to see him disappear. Not like Sir Auron! Nonononono!
He didn't look at her. He began to walk away. He hadn't said much, but he tried not to acknowledge her. It would make it harder and she understood, but she didn't understand.
She ran towards him, and she tried to hold him to her, to knock him down and beat him senseless until he understood that he was not leaving her like this, then to hold him to her as hard as she could and cry and cry until she could cry no more, then cry some more.
He had turned around after her cry and spread his arms, ready to take her into his embrace, and probably accept all the things she was thinking of with open arms, because he knew they both didn't want to leave, and that they both just wanted to breathlessly kiss each other until they melted into one another and were just a Tidus-Yuna mush with no worries and no sadness and just love.
But she went right through him.
Surprise was evident in both their faces, the gasps from their group only feeding their shock.
Yuna could feel all her thoughts and dreams and all the emotions and feelings and things she wanted to do, like ride a shoopuf ten times for fun and then jump off of it or swim in the sea without the fear of Sin suddenly coming out of it and killing you and eating ice cream in Luca, and watching a blitzball game, and even walking through the city without someone stopping to gape at you because of who you are, they all just broke and shattered into a million tiny pieces, as if she had been a piece of delicate glass and had been destroyed on impact with the steel floor of the airship.
She didn't want to stand up.
Broken. That's what she was. Glass that was already cracked could not survive being dropped again.
She could hear the sobs escaping the boy - no, he was a man now, wasn't he? – as she stood up and straightened herself. She stared into the yellowish-brownish colored clouds that had appeared around the airship and suddenly was hit with the realization…
"I love you."
She had never told him.
She hadn't ever told him how much she wanted to walk along the beach barefoot with him holding hands in the sunset. How she wanted to sit up at night and stare at the stars, naming the constellations they were able to recognize. Or staying up all night whispering sweet nothings into each other's ears. Not even how she wanted to go to a carnival and eat cotton candy and ride the chocobo games with him.
She couldn't see what was happening, but she assumed he had begun walking towards her. She hadn't turned around. She was too busy picking up her pieces to be able to look at him. If she looked at him, she was sure she'd drop the pieces she had picked up.
Suddenly, she felt this odd sensation of warmth and sunlight and happiness and love and just Tidus around her. She saw the arms wrap around her and she smiled. She would have leaned back into him, had she not known that she would just fall right through him.
Suddenly, that small moment was over, and he had walked straight through her. The feeling of him and her being together was the oddest one she had ever felt. It felt like he was holding her tightly to himself, except that it was so tightly they had actually merged together. But as quickly as it had come, it was over.
She watched with sadness at him beginning to walk away, then he began to run and he jumped. Jumped into the abyss, and disappeared.
She choked back sobs and had a fleeting image of jumping after him, but she knew that was stupid. She couldn't fly anymore.
It took a while for her to get over it. She was calm about it for maybe a few minutes, but she suddenly buckled over, as if she had just had an intense wave of pain go through her when the two other females of the group approached her in worry.
She began to sob uncontrollably. She rocked back and forth, trying to put her fingers together and whistle, but not only did she not whistle properly, she got tears and saliva all over her hand and she just began rocking harder back and forth. Lulu grabbed her quickly and stopped her manic movements, bringing her into an embrace, brushing her hands through the girl's hair, whispering little things to reassure her that it would be alright, even if she knew it wouldn't be. Rikku had not even tried speaking, letting Lulu do it instead, and had wrapped her own arms around the other girl, burying her face into the girl's shoulders, and to Yuna's surprise, she felt warm liquid through the material.
She knew that she had to stop soon. But she just couldn't! He was gone. Gone. Just like her father, her mother, and Sir Auron and Sir Jecht and all the people she had lost to Sin and Yunalesca and the spiral of death. And she kept rocking back and forth for the longest time, until she had fallen asleep. She suspected it had been more of a fainting type of thing, but sleep none-the-less.
It was a dreamless sleep, and she was glad for that little blessing from the fayth and… Well, what would their god be now? A blessing from the holy spirits, she supposed, for all her hard work.
And she woke up, and she was ready for the world. Ready to take on the new Spira, and ready to try and move on and all the things that were expected of her.
She was ready to pick up all the pieces, and maybe, just maybe, make a better glass. One that didn't break, with band-aids with smiley faces and reflecting off of it a new life that would start, one that she would plan for while it happened, and the ending was a mystery, because her death day would not be known to her.
And maybe she'd be able to find him. She didn't believe he was gone.
He never said goodbye, did he?