The captain made landfall on the shore where Lord Braska and Jecht had died, fighting Sin eleven years ago.
"I don't want to lose you too," I said in Rikku's ear, holding her back from attacking the monstrous Sin looming over Lord Braska. "Don't leave me all alone."
I ran inland. This time instead of running into the dome, I ran the other way, heading up toward Mount Gagazet. I ran. I cleaved fiends out of my way, frantic.
"Don't leave me all alone!" she screamed at me, in Yevon Dome, trying to drag me away from my hate-fueled quest for vengeance against Yunalesca. "That's what you said to me, isn't it? Well, now it's my turn! I lost them too! I don't want to lose you!"
The fiends were never-ending. I kept looking up at the broken face of the mountain staring down on the ruins of Zanarkand.
"Once Yevon's defeated," said Tidus, "the dream will end."
Rikku whirled. "What dream?"
"The dream of the fayth," said Tidus. "They have been sleeping for hundreds of years, dreaming of Zanarkand and its people as they were a thousand years ago. My old man was brought out of that dream to help Spira. So was I."
"RRRR!" I screamed, taking out all my frustrated helplessness on the snow wolf in front of me. Pyreflies swirled in my eyes, blocking my vision. I rounded the bend and there she was.
Rikku crouched by the cratered face of the mountain where masses of fayth had once lain side by side, fixed and dreaming, overlooking the ruins of the land they were dreaming back into its glory days. She was huddled over something.
I dropped my sword and ran to her. She whirled at the noise, lifting her Godhand, still crouched. I halted.
"Rikku," I said.
"Go away," she snarled.
I looked from her to the mixture-filled pestle she was holding, to the sphere actively displaying static text in the air. How to make a fayth. I took a step toward her.
"I said go away!" she said.
"Don't do this," I said. "Please don't."
"You don't understand," she said.
"That's right, I don't," I said, struggling to keep my voice calm. "Help me understand. Tell me."
"Piss off!" she said. "I don't want you here!"
"Not on your life," I said. "I will not let you die."
She laughed. "It's not death. Not really."
"Yes, it is, Rikku. You will be just as dead as Jecht was when Yunalesca made him a fayth."
"Jecht! Jecht didn't die! He was a dream, Auron! And so was Tidus! Don't you understand? The fayth were tired. They wanted to stop dreaming. They'd been dreaming for such a long time. But how long would I have to dream? The lifetime of two people? Just two people, Auron. They would be just as alive as they ever were. Wouldn't you want to see Jecht again? Wouldn't you want to see Yuna happy, with Tidus?"
"No!" I shouted. "Not at the expense of your life!"
"What life? This life? My life?" She laughed hollowly. "My life! My life sucks! I can't stop dreaming, and they're all awful dreams! Even when I'm awake, it's still there! I've finally found a way to bring two of them back. And that is worth everything! It's worth giving up my creddo life for theirs!"
"NO IT ISN'T! DAMN IT RIKKU!"
She lifted the pestle to her lips. I ran at her, grabbed it from her and hurled it with all my strength off the cliff.
She screamed, an unholy animalistic noise, and attacked me.
It was the fight of a lifetime. She fought like she was actually going to kill me. She got in several hits before I recovered my sword and could start fending her off. Even fighting Yunalesca I don't think I'd ever seen her so infuriated. She knew my every move, and she seemed far more invested in harming me than I was in defending her blows. She disarmed me. My sword went sailing, twisting end over end, after her pestle. I stood unarmed before her, exhausted. I had had it. I was not going to resort to magic. I spread my hands.
"Take my life," I said. "You went back in time ten years to save it. It's yours to take."
She rocked on her heels, and I knew I had got it right.
I waited, arms wide.
She crumpled to the ground. I lowered my arms, but didn't dare approach. Instead I slid around behind her and picked up the sphere. Her head snapped up as I shattered it against the rock. She howled. She folded in on herself, sobbing so hard she started coughing and choking.
I drew closer and knelt down. As I put my arms around her she beat at me, but with her fists, not the Godhand. Eventually she gave up and just shook in my arms. Her skin was freezing cold where it touched my bare shoulder inside my jacket. She was not dressed for the weather, and skinnier even than when I'd left her on Baaj. I hoisted her into my arms. The scar of the fayth had left a cave out of the wind and snow, and that was as far as I thought I could carry her in my exhausted state.
At the back of the cave I set her down and took off my jacket to draw around her violently trembling body. Her sobs were losing power, but her shaking remained frighteningly strong. I pulled her back into my arms and rocked her.
"I am still pissed at you," I murmured. "Not for trying to kill me—I don't blame you, I'm a pain in the ycc—but for trying to kill you. For thinking that was the only way out of all this hurt."
"I dream you'e still dead," she whispered in my ear. "Every night. Every night I remember how you looked before I went back in time, and the memory I saw in Yevon Dome of Yunalesca killing you, and that day… that day…" She drew a shaky breath. I patiently rocked her until the words came again.
"Back then, on the airship, I couldn't sleep one night, and no one else was awake, so I just kept pacing up and down the corridors, and then I found you," she said. "I swear you looked right at me. I can still smell the sake, and see the pyreflies swirling all around you and through your body, the scar over your right eye. Days and nights afterward I saw that vision, waking and sleeping. I couldn't get it out of me. I wanted to kill Yunalesca, but by that time she was already dead, and I felt so helpless, so helpless. There was nothing I could do to undo your death ten years ago. I went on a rampage in Yevon Dome. I wanted to kill everything. And I screamed and raged and that's where the Fayth of Knowledge found me."
She lifted her head. In the pale sunlight filtering to the back of the cave I saw her reddened eyes, her snotty blotchy face. She sniffled.
"The fayth sent me back in time to save you. But even after I did… I still had the dreams and memories! I thought they'd go away and they never did! How can I remember things that never happened? I miss Jecht and Braska and Tidus, but it's not their deaths I dream about—it's yours! I went crazy, Auron! I have memories that never happened and they won't leave me alone! What more can I do?" She grabbed my black undershirt and shook me, desperate. "What more can I DO?!"
My heart went out to her, that desperate, pale face that had been silently wrestling with a terrifying nightmare she thought no one could understand. And now I finally understood why she wouldn't tell me.
"Me," I said. "It was me you were mourning, yet I was still alive."
"Yes," she whispered. "And I don't understand it! I mean, you drove me nuts! When… before I went back in time and saved you, you were a serious, stodgy, pain in the ycc! You smirked instead of laughed! You had no sympathy for a poor scared girl on the Thunder Plains! You were always standing around judging all of us from behind those stupid little sunglasses and that high collar you wore! And you sat around being vilgehk DEAD!" She wailed anew and buried her head in my shoulder.
I stroked her hair. "So if you hated me so much, why did you travel ten years back in time to save me? You could have died, you know."
"Yeah, I know," she muttered, muffled, into the shoulder she was soaking with her leaky face.
"So why, then?" I said.
She sighed, slumping in my arms, and lifted her head. "I don't know."
I lifted an eyebrow at her.
She shrugged and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. "I really don't. At first I thought it was because you were just like me, angry and hotheaded when you challenged Yunalesca and she killed you. But I was naïve, and angry, and now I don't even know anymore what I was thinking. If I was thinking. I mean, now, obviously, I'd do it all over again, knowing how much I enjoy your specific brand of pain in the ycc, even if you are turning into a kind of irritating high-on-life cheerful tebcred." She glared at me. "Which is even more maddening alongside memories of the intolerable dead you I remember. But the more I know you now, the more mystified I am that the unsent Auron I met was someone I wanted so badly to save that I would go to those lengths and risk that much." She sniffled again, hard, and swallowed.
"Maybe you saw my potential to not be a total asshole."
She shook her head. "I wasn't that perspicacious, back then."
"All of a year and a half ago."
Her head hit my shoulder with a groan. "Feels like ten."
I stroked her back and sighed. "With what you've been going through, that is understandable."
"I don't want to have nightmares anymore," she said softly. "There's no sleeping powder dose strong enough anymore that won't kill me. That's when I first thought about dying, and I'd been reading about the fayth that day, and I thought… what if, instead of dying, I changed the dream? Permanently? Instead of dreaming you dead every night and having the memories intruding on me every day, I could dream Tidus and Jecht back to life. All I had to do was find out how to turn someone into a fayth, without the aid of Yunalesca. I knew Seymour had done it with his mother, so I thought, why can't I do it myself? I am, after all, the Amazing Rikku." She half-heartedly punched the air, her face still sunk into my shoulder.
"I think we both need sleep. A lot of sleep," I said. "Maybe instead of holding it all in, you could talk to me about it. Then, at least, you wouldn't be alone, and if you ever get one of these harebrained ideas again you could run it past me and I could say 'RAMM HU! Let's come up with some other solutions. The two of us. Together.'"
"Like what?" She lifted her head to wipe her whole face with one hand, and stared blearily at me. "Seriously, what can I do to get these memories that never happened to go away? I think it may be some side effect of the time travel, that maybe this is a permanent problem, because I lived through a different past."
"Yes, but you're here now, and I am not dead."
She nodded. "I keep telling myself that, and it doesn't help."
I took her hand and pressed it to my face. "Here. Touch. Not dead. Wake me up in the night and ask me if I'm dead. I guarantee I'll tell you no."
"Then we'll both be miserable and sleep-deprived."
I sighed. "And both alive. …Maybe it will not always be this way. Maybe talking about it will help."
She lifted an eyebrow at me.
I smiled tiredly. "And if it doesn't work, we'll try something else, all right? But not making you a fayth. Jecht and Tidus are gone, and that sucks, but that is it. There is a lot in this life that doesn't suck, and there would be even more if I don't have to worry about you ever, ever, ever, and I mean EVER, doing this again or thinking about this without immediately talking to me or Yuna or Lulu or, ramm, even Kimahri about it. Agreed?"
She nodded. "Agreed, Auron."
"Promise?"
"I promise." She drew an 'X' on herself. "Cross my heart and hope to…" She saw my look and stopped with a wry grin. "All right, all right, bad joke."
"Yes."
She sighed. "You're right, we should talk more often."
"Yes."
"Are your legs asleep yet?"
"Yes."
She scrambled off my lap. I rubbed my legs, wishing the rest of me could join them, figuratively speaking. I leaned into the cave wall and closed my eyes.
"Oh, hey, a sphere," she said.
"Mm," I said.
"Wonder how long it's been back here. It must have been under the fayth."
My eyes popped open. "If it's anything having to do with how to kill yourself you're ordered to smash it to bits immediately."
She rolled her eyes. "Yes, dad."
I growled at her. She activated the sphere.
We watched it, dumfounded. Afterward, we looked at each other, and she played it again.
"Yunie has to see this," Rikku murmured on the third watching.
"Are you sure? We don't know what it means," I said.
"She has to see this," Rikku repeated. "She deserves to know this exists."
I nodded. "Then we will show it to her."
"What do you think it might mean, Auron?"
"I don't care to speculate. I do not think it would help."
Whatever she tried to say next was drowned out by the roar of an engine. High-pressure winds blasted in at us, and as we looked up a light snapped on, blinding us.
"Hey in there! Cozy?" called a familiar voice, over what sounded like a public address.
"What the ramm is that?" said Rikku, clutching her Godhand and—to my amusement—moving so she was between me and it.
"I think it's our ride," I said.
It was.
"The sphere oscillo-finder is installed and functioning perfectly!" Buddy enthused.
"Great," said Rikku tiredly. "Where's the beds?"
"We managed to locate you through…" Buddy continued, oblivious, striding across the bridge of the airship Celsius to show them something.
"Beds," I said sharply. "Now."
"Oh… right," said Buddy, looking hurt.
"We'll have time for a tour later," I said.
"All the time in Spira," muttered Rikku. She was too tired to smile back at my grateful look.
We sacked out on bunks under the windows of the Celsius. Buddy promised us he'd take us to Besaid Island, but not disturb us. There was some Hypello in the cabin, babbling, but I'd lost the capacity to care. I waved him off and climbed tiredly into bed.
I suppose, I thought as I lost consciousness, this will be my bed for a while to come. I paid enough for it. Settled, but always on the move. Maybe this won't be so bad.
