CHAPTER TEN: A Little Fall of Rain
--
Yuna
--
The Zanarkand sky had never looked so unfriendly to Yuna's eyes. Scowling thunder tore from the clouds and rolled through the stadium, bestowing the night's Blitzball with a brutal electricity.
The roar of the crowds was something savage in a game this far into the tournament. Yuna felt the effect; her fists made white knuckles whenever Tidus championed the ball, her breath shuddering ivory mist whenever she lost sight of him.
Despite herself, she could not help but continue to admire the certain artistry involved in the young athlete's movements; the deft turns, the quick catches; a perfectly executed somersault. After all, what is Blitzball if not a kind of water dance? And one no less skilled than the Sending, in its own way, she mused. It always warmed Yuna to think on their likenesses.
Afterwards she found herself in high spirits, sharing in the soaring exultation of the Abes' victory as though some part of it were her own. Waiting underneath the statue of Lord Ohalland, she and Rikku made their own game, tossing a blitzball back and forth, teasing and laughing at each other as it sang through the air. Once Yuna even managed to twirl the ball on her finger for a lingering moment, a trick Tidus had been taking pains to teach her.
Unfortunately, by the time Wakka arrived, she and Rikku had been cornered by a Youth League recruiter pushing Spheres in their faces. The Abes captain soon sent him off with a cold look that might have stilled even Lulu's step. Until then Yuna had not thought the gentle giant of a man capable of such threat. Yet Wakka's face was all smiles as he returned his attention to them. Her new friends were always surprising her!
Rikku bounced a semi-circle around the captain, hugging his arm with that easy affection Yuna often envied. "Great game, big guy!" the little Al-Bhed chirped at him.
Wakka handed them each a foam cup of regen juice which they accepted eagerly, then stretched down his large hand to muss Rikku's golden hair. "Glad to hear it! You enjoy yourself, Yuna?"
"Oh, yes!" she said feelingly, "it was excellent!" She drank eagerly from the cup. The juice was tart and pleasantly refreshing in the sticky heat. With effort Yuna managed to brush away any runaway thoughts of the absent member of the party and throw herself into a lively discussion about the match.
Through her self-teaching Yuna found herself able to talk to some extent about the subtleties of the game; she could tell a decent nap shot from a bad one atleast, recognised the names of some of Wakka's strategies, knew how many points the team was set back each time one of the players pushed the violence a little too far. It was pleasant to know something other than lore and Sending, something as ordinary and weightless as Blitzball tactics.
The welcome distraction lasted only until it became clear why Tidus had lingered. His emergence at last from the stadium gates was heralded by a deluge of Blitzer girls, hovering about him with tangible enthusiasm.
Yuna only realised she was staring when she was startled by Wakka's bark of laughter. "I wondered where that boy had got to, ya? A pretty girl and he's off like a volley shot."
Which girl? Yuna counted seven. They were uniformed in identical skin-tight waterproofs, hair slicked wetly down their necks. Yet they were clearly discussing business rather than pleasure; intent, focused looks on their pretty faces. Yuna thought about the Blitzball instruction book under her mattress and felt suddenly foolish.
I'm not like them, she thought defiantly. I know his secrets, I've seen his tears. He let me hold him. Yet those old doubts were setting creepers in her heart again. "Which team are they from?" she asked, in what she hoped was an unaffected tone. Her nails made ribbons in the foam cup.
"Some new all-girl team from Luca." Wakka explained. "S'posed to be pretty good."
"Yeah right," Rikku added scathingly, arms akimbo. Yuna realised vaguely that the little Al-Bhed was trying to take the empty foam cup from her hand to prevent her from scratching it to pieces. "Ugh, look at them. They are so all over him."
Yuna wanted to hug her, but Wakka only chuckled and mussed Rikku's hair again. "Ti's always having his heads turned by girls. Boy needs his friends, not a girlfriend. That's why he's got Yuna, ya?"
Gods. The gravity of those words washed over Wakka, but Yuna heard them like the roar of a tidal wave. She felt herself shrink in humiliation before he and Rikku at this new proposed avatar of herself; Tidus' keeper, matron, safeguard.
Rikku's expression had changed too; she glanced between Yuna and Wakka with visible discomfort. "Wakka," she whined, "I don't think-"
"I am honoured to be his friend," Yuna answered with empty solemnity. That was always enough for me before. Yet her heart pulsed painfully in her chest; she felt suddenly confused and hateful and ashamed. Wakka's innocent speech seemed to make pathetic the notion that she would even be considered a rival to the Blitzer girls and their ilk.
She was so consumed with the notion that when Tidus finally strode towards their party with a Blitzball captured confidently under one arm, Yuna barely noticed.
"Hey Yuna, think fast!"
Still trying to sort through the static buzz filling her mind, Yuna only briefly recognised the whistle of the Tidus' Blitzball when it smacked into her midsection with a hollow thud.
"Gods, Yuna, are you okay?!" Alarm laced Tidus' tone. "Did I hurt you?"
Yuna sought to hide her face by bending to retrieve the Blitzball at her feet, not trusting its expression. But Tidus, always intent on being the thief of her troubles, came towards her unafraid, catching her forearm and raising her gently from the ground.
"Hey, what happened, we were doing just fine yesterday… You were my star Blitzer." He was smiling at her, but his sunkissed features shifted as she came unsteadily to her feet. "Hey, hey, Yuna..."
"There you are." Lulu's deep voice penetrated their party, gliding towards them with her usual powerful grace. "We've been looking for you for some time."
At the mage's tail came Gippal, Baralai and Isaaru, the latter offering Yuna a nervous half smile which didn't fit with the grim, stoic looks worn by his companions.
Tidus took the Blitzball gently from Yuna and tucked it casually under one arm. He took his Bltizball stance, expecting confrontation.
"We have a request to ask of you," said Baralai eventually. He seemed hesitant in asking, still lingering in Lulu's shadow. Yuna was curious despite herself; which intrigued Yuna; the Praetor seemed a man who was rarely fazed.
"What do you want?" Tidus asked with suspicion, directing his question at Gippal rather than the speaker.
The two boys stared each other down for some moments, so it fell to Lulu to answer the question.
"They want Yuna."
--
Tidus
--
When he saw the dead woman, Tidus knew this was no longer his game.
Dona's body lay not far from the slums of C-South, half-concealed in an alleyway. A black stain like a violent star had spread beneath her and it took Tidus one long deafening moment to realise it was blood.
He took in the harrowing scene with astonishment; there was Barthello kneeling at the dead woman's side, Lulu's friend Paine with a hand clapped on his shoulder and what looked like a senior member of the Crimson Squad to investigate the death.
He hadn't known the girl himself, only glimpsed her once or twice sashaying through the bars of Zanarkand south. Gippal knew her well, he remembered, from his brief Sphere hunter days, had probably made a few moves on her too. It was terrifying how easily Dona had been stripped of her former glamour; she looked utterly fragile, her body curled into itself like a child in pain.
"What happened here?" said Lulu sternly, taking charge with little effort. "Does anyone know?"
The Crimson man assessed her for a moment with dark, calculating eyes. "No witnesses have come forward."
"Why ain't she been moved?" Wakka asked, features twisted in distaste. He was not alone in that; Rikku had turned her face into Gippal's shoulder. "You could atleast have the decency to put her in a casket, ya?"
Paine's eyes flickered towards him impatiently. "The death was unclean. She needs to be Sent quickly, before she becomes a Fiend," she said bluntly. Underneath her hand, Barthello gave a choking sob that brought no tears, but seemed to wrack his huge body to its very core.
All of Tidus' nerves were ablaze with a feeling akin to disbelief. Like Rikku he had the native urge to turn his face from the corpse. He felt sick. A death like this was something far too ugly for the City of Lights, his city. Maybe for the former generation, this sort of senseless waste had been commonplace, but not now… not for the children of the Eternal Calm.
"Miss, are you willing to perform the ceremony?"
It took Tidus some moments to realise that the Crimson Squad official was addressing Yuna.
"Hey, hold on a second," he said with alarm, striding towards them with the intention of dispelling the proposal. He knew Yuna performed Sendings, but they had to be quiet, family affairs, surely – the sort with flowers and devotions; timely deaths of the elderly or else unfortunate children who had succumbed to sickness. This death was, as Paine had put it, "unclean" in the most extreme sense, hardly a task that should fall to someone like Yuna. "Back off, that's not her-"
"No, I will answer. I can Send her."
Her words, though not without gentleness, were clipped, and Tidus felt the rebuke deep in his bones. He might have felt the sting less if the disguised scolding had come from Lulu, but to hear it from Yuna…
"Don't you require a summoning staff for that?" Baralai was asking.
Yuna's coloured beads rattled softly as she shook her head. "The staff is only for ceremony, or to give balance in training. I can do without."
Her cool exterior was somehow infuriating to Tidus. He felt bizarrely as though she were closing those black iron gates on him, as though this time they were too high for him to scale. Nowhere in her face did he see a sign that his intervention would be welcomed.
"Are you sanctioned, young lady?" The Crimson man asked.
"Yes, almost two years ago. My teacher was Belgemine, once of Bevelle."
"Just do it. Please," Barthello pleaded, his voice so rough that it was hard not to hear the unshed tears in it.
Baralai had brought candles to lend the setting more light. Yuna seemed to approve; she exchanged quiet words with the young Praetor and his charge Isaaru, giving directions on where to place them.
Tidus, feeling that events were moving too fast for him to follow, took another step towards the party, though what he intended to do he could not have said. Before he could take a second step, Lulu's long fingers had curled around his forearm, her face a dark mask. "No," she said sharply. "You cannot protect her from this." Her once-Guardian eyes were full of fire.
As easily as that, Tidus felt himself fade into the background. All he could do was watch grimly from the sidelines with the others as the setting crept to life with candlelight. Flame-cast shadows played on Yuna's pale, solemn face as she took her stance.
He had seen the Sending performed before, but never so flawlessly as this. Yuna was visibly in her element; her slender arms stretching out like a crane, long sleeves sweeping behind her like wings, so that all eyes were drawn helplessly to her.
It will never be beautiful to me, she had told him once, but he had never truly understood. Not until now. It was not like the free-spirited dances of the Kilikans in Shiva's Plaza, or the ballets of the Zanarkand Opera House once so beloved by his mother. Yuna danced with mortality itself, an act that drunk colour even from the proud flames, which now flickered pale blue, weak and withering.
It was the unearthly injustice of it all that angered him the most; knowing that here was a girl who should be admired for her kindness and cherished for her innocence. A girl who under any other sun owned a grace that softened the most bitter of hearts. She made Rikku braver, Gippal kinder and Lulu more gentle. Yet before him danced a girl he hardly knew; a sad-hearted creature suddenly as unreachable as his father once was.
He felt desperately he would rather be anywhere but here. He found himself thirsting for water; water to take the taste of death from his mouth, water to wash away the ashes. In a Blitzball game with the spray hitting his face glorious and violent, on the edge of the houseboat looking out onto the gently pulsating waves of the harbour, or dipping a hand into the fountain of Aeons in the East-A Plaza. His whole being wanted to thrash against the cage of this macabre ritual, to break free from it utterly.
Instead he made himself watch her until she lowered her outstretched hands, gracefully, as though tempering an ocean wave. When she lifted her face, Tidus could see the same control that he saw on the playing field, effortlessly maintained. "She has reached the Farplane," Yuna told them solemnly.
In an instant the others were at her side; Lulu and Baralai offering quiet praise, Barthello tearful gratitude. Yet try as he might, Tidus could not make himself go to her.
He was not alone; Rikku was sickly pale, green eyes round and pained in her young face. "Come on, Cid's girl," said Gippal in a voice strangely gentle. His arm was still iron around her shoulder. "I'll take you home."
--
--
When all but a few of the candles had burnt out, Yuna came to him at last.
"His friends will take care of him now," she told Tidus. "I need to go before father gets home. Will you walk with me?" She looked slightly unsure, as though he might refuse.
Tidus couldn't trust himself to speak at that moment, too consumed with frustration and confusion and inexplicably, hurt. He nudged his chin towards the path to B-North. She seemed to understand, and when they set off together, their first steps were in tune.
"I think I understand now," he said eventually. They were far enough on the B-North route that faint Kilikan folk music could be heard from the musician's quarter. He chose to ignore it. "About the Sending, I mean."
The way she looked at him then – like someone who had known pain might look with pity and envy at a wide-eyed innocent – made him wish he could take the words back.
"They told me before," she said, with distant resignation. "My father told me. My teacher warned me. The Sending is not just a dance. It is a sacrifice, she said. With some, you can show them the path and they follow. But others… you have to walk with them a little way. Sometimes, it is hard to let go. For us both."
A raw and unrelenting anger was pooling in Tidus' gut. That measure of sadness in her smile that he had seen from the first... that guarded sorrow that had always given her some of Lulu's quality; all had its roots in this age-old calling, this gruesome ceremony of the dead. I'm a first class idiot. It wasn't anything to do with her old man.
He wanted to curse the day he ever got her involved with New Yevon. His fresh anger at Gippal was like ripping a scab from an old wound. He wanted to curse Barthello, and Isaaru, and especially Baralai who had hovered around Yuna during the ceremony with some sort of mysterious kinship, seeming to give her some comfort where he could not.
"Why?" he said finally, misleadingly quiet. "Why don't you just stop?"
A bruised smile came fleeting to her face. "And what would I do then?"
"What? Lots of stuff, Yuna. Anything you want."
She cocked her head to the side, as though listening to a sound in the distance.
Tidus threw his hands out, exasperated. "Well, I dunno! Maybe I could teach you to play Blitzball. Real Blitzball."
A strained little laugh bubbled from her lips; she seemed amused at the notion. "You told me that would take a long time, remember?"
He made a frustrated sound. The Kilikan music was growing softer, each step carrying them further away from the Sending, yet somehow closer to the heart of it.
"My father wouldn't approve. Neither would Lulu, I think."
"What have they got to do with it? You don't have to answer to anyone, Yuna."
"Yes, I do." Her voice was so soft Tidus had to strain to hear it. But it had a hard edge, making her words unmistakable. "I must answer to myself."
With a sinking heart, he knew that she meant it with every fibre of her being.
--
Yuna
--
On their way home from the Sending, the heavens opened. Needles of white rain plummeted from the sky while Tidus ran and Yuna tore blindly after him; his sneakers and her boots crashing through the streets of C-East.
They staggered under the canvas of an Al-Bhed stall, clothes clinging wetly, faces dripping. Other shelter-seeking Zanarkanders soon joined them, appearing like ghosts in the mist; some laughing, others cursing and wringing their hair.
Yuna stared out amongst a sea of staring faces and thought that the storm did not become the great metropolis, which had always seemed to her to be bathed in an eternal summer. The amber lights dimmed beneath the power of the elements, the rain's music drowning the merrymaking of Zanarkanders.
As new life poured into the stall and Yuna was pushed further back, Tidus' fingers pressed against the small of her back in a protective gesture, but when she glanced at him she found his eyes far away, as though he couldn't even see her.
"Are you alright?" she asked searchingly, lifting her voice to break through the rainwater thrumming noisily from the canvas.
It seemed a lifetime before his eyes met hers. He affected a smile, but it was one that Yuna had seen before. It is the smile he used to wear before he made amends with his father. She had judged him a poor liar back then. It saddened her to think that even now, he would not release that private grief to her.
Hardly a word has fallen between us since the Sending. He had not liked it, she knew. No more than the others and yet… it troubles him the most. Was the Sending truly so unsightly to him?
Yuna had seen death half-a-hundred times. She had been Sending souls to the Farplane for as long as Tidus had been signing Blitzballs. Death was the one thing her father had never shielded her from. She had watched the Dance at his side as a child, followed Belgemine's steps in her girlhood, before finally taking up the staff at tender sixteen. She had borne it all with quiet dutifulness, never caring that taking the role so young might set her in obscurity.
Yet she thought a pair of blue eyes might yet change all that. I wonder... Back on Besaid, Belgemine had told her that the liveliest children were the ones most sensitive to pyreflies. The sweep of a Summoner's staff could shred even the most indestructible of smiles. And Tidus… well, he was like a burst of laughter in cold silence, like a blast of summer sunshine among sullen skies. Standing him next to a dead girl was like driving home some dramatic symbolism from an old Yevonite morality play. It is no wonder that he recoiled from it.
She replayed the ritual in her mind from beginning to end, from the first fevered step of the dance to her last backwards glance at the grieving Barthello.
"You have a choice to make," she had told Dona's bereaved. "Die, and be free of pain or live and fight your sorrow." Her father's words. Such harsh words. She looked into Tidus' handsome face, fresh with grief, and suddenly felt as old as the first Lady Yunalesca.
They were halfway home when it occurred to Yuna that he may want nothing more to do with a girl who danced with death. It was only half of a trembling thought, before she convinced herself that he could never be so cruel, to cut her from his life like a thread. Yet in her mind's eye she could see him turning away from her, as he had that night in the garden.
When he turned his back to me, I reached out to him. She could do so again. How easy it would be! To offer him comfort, to fold her arms around him. To tell him that she had been scared, that the sight of the dead girl had shocked her, that her heart had rejected it like his. But the falsehood would be an injury to her Sender's pride, and somehow betraying Dona and Belgemine both. Yes, and all the Senders that came before us, too. No - she atleast would not be a liar. Not in this. Not even for him.
That night the iron gates had never looked so impenetrable, nor Tidus so out of reach. He did not follow her into the garden, but stood apart while she descended. Standing there so still, he looked to Yuna like some unearthly thing, his hair silvered by the long fingers of the moon. He was so achingly beautiful that she could barely stand to look at him.
It's too late for me, she realised sadly, a strange and terrible stillness taking hold of her heart. Somewhere her admiration and shy, cautious comaraderie with Tidus had fled, only to be replaced with a raw and dangerous yearning. After all the guards she had put in place, all the warnings she had etched in her heart, she had still been defeated by that rainbeaten hope that she was somehow precious to him.
When he had gone, Yuna sank miserably onto the wet grass. She watched as water pooled pitifully into the spot where his sneakers had imprinted in the rubble, washing away his presence like some kind of twisted omen.
She thought about the story she had told Rikku, of the Hypello who had fallen in love with a Spiran. It was too tempting, too easy to trace the romantic parallel with herself. The human girl was kind to the creature, Yuna remembered from her father's books, but in the end she only pitied it. According to legend, the maiden had married another; in some tales an admired Macalanian warrior, in others a wise leader of her tribe, but always someone from the same world.
She couldn't bear to think of herself becoming that; a little grasping creature, reaching for a lamp that swung before her without ever touching its light. Will he want me by his side when he marries one of those Blitzer girls? she thought bitterly, will I smile for him then? Could she smile while another girl in another garden nursed his hurts? You said that you were different from those girls, and you are. But not in the way you wanted.
Yuna laid her palms open in her lap and gazed into them like a mirror. She wished she could see her old self in them; that Besaidian girl and her quietly happy universe. A girl who never envied or hated. A girl proud of her calling. A girl who never lied to her father.
More brutal was the knowledge that she had brought it upon herself, collecting dreams as haphazardly as a hungry child. Small wonder they should go unfulfilled. Somehow she had fallen under Zanarkand's spell, blinded so quickly, so effortlessly by its lights and promises. Far from the pious simplicity of those island shores, she felt herself desperate and envious, no longer satisfied by her lot in life. This isn't who I wanted to be, she thought sadly. This isn't the Zanarkand I wished for.
Alone in the night air, Yuna closed her eyes and dreamed of Besaid.
--
Auron
--
Auron had avoided the downpour. As he walked the abandoned streets in the rising dawn, water gushed blue into the Zanarkand gutters, sending rivers sweeping past his boots. The air felt cold and electric, the thunder-spent clouds now a sullen grey.
The taste of static put him in mind of the Thunderplains, and the time he had spent there with Braska and his Guard. He had tailed his Summoner like a shadow in those early days, finding threat behind every foreign door, under every unfamiliar stone.
So his unease had only strengthened when Braska insisted on resting at an Al Bhed travel agency; a lonely, derelict building in the savage emptiness of the Plains. It was some tenuous connection with that despised race that had caused Braska to fall out of favour with Yevon for a time, though Auron knew none of the particulars. Since then the Summoner had publicly renounced the Al Bhed and their ways in order to have his Pilgrimage sanctioned, but Auron suspected his Lord still nursed a queer fondness for a pair of green eyes. Of course, it did not follow that Auron himself had to harbour any trust for that heathen race.
"My Lord, you should not linger out of doors alone here," he had admonished Braska, finding him missing from his quarters one evening. It had taken him ten beats of a troubled heart to locate his Summoner's pale silhouette under the building's small canvas, staring out into the night.
"Do not be concerned, Auron," Braska said. His voice was as ever-steady as rainfall, a cool comfort in this land of chaos. The Summoner allowed a pause for the lightening to strike before continuing his speech, seeming to sense when it would come. "Jecht is not far. He is tracking a fiend."
Auron grunted his displeasure. That man... he is no fit Guardian for you. We should have left him drunk on his grief back in Luca.
Braska gave a low chuckle, reading his friend's thoughts quite clearly. "You do not like him, do you, Auron?"
"It is not for me to question your choices," the Guardian said reluctantly, leaving the rest unspoken.
"And yet?"
The invitation to speak was too tempting for Auron. "My Lord, you must see why I cannot approve. This Zanarkander tarnishes us all. I will not deny he can handle a sword, but there are others who are better." Myself, for one. "My Lord, you already have two Guardians skilled in katana and the black arts. Jyscal and I would suffice for your protection. Why allow this man to continue to risk your pilgrimage?"
"You think I chose him on some whim of emotion." Braska's tone held no accusation, no anger. His composure never wavered, his voice never shook; the silhouette was as still as it had ever been. "I would not fault you for thinking so, Auron. My emotions have oft led me to grief before." Secrets glittered behind the Summoner's eyes, but they were not for a lowly warrior monk to know.
Yes, said Auron's heart, that is the way of it, yet he let his silence speak for him.
Braska sighed then, making a weary sweeping motion with his hand as though to dust away unwanted memories. Finally facing his young Guardian, he said with rare decision, "We are already an unpopular party, Auron. Jecht's conduct – however... unconventional - can cause us no further harm. Indeed you are my sword, and Jyscal my shield." His eyes returned to the night, and he smiled at the sight of Jecht in the distance, ambling towards them with a fist in the air. "Yet there must also be a spirit."
Auron had felt the words with a dull resentment back then, and not even the memory of Braska's smile could make him recall the scene with any rebirth of affection. He could never seem to think of the past without the bitterness creeping upon him like a stain.
A shock of pain, uncoiling through the length of his arm, ripped Auron from his memories. The wound has reopened, he noted with irritation. He had not returned from his latest Crusade without injury. Two claw marks from an adult Coeurl, deep enough to scar, ran ragged along his forearm. When he returned to the house, he would have Yuna make a poultice for him from honey and Kilikan sourleaf. A potion would work as well, but he liked home comforts. And it would give him a chance to sit and talk with his daughter. She would scold him for being careless, of course. He smiled at the thought.
So moved by this mental image as he came at last to the house in B-North, Auron in his isolation almost overlooked his housekeeper waiting for him by the door.
Shelinda struck a defiant pose, her hands clawed around the handles of two small iguion-skin suitcases. They looked full to bursting.
"Sir," she said, before he even had the chance to express his bewilderment, "I regret to inform you of my resignation. I believe this establishment is no longer suitable for my person." She did not seem to notice the trickle of blood running down his forearm, or otherwise chose not to. Auron quickly concealed the offending hand beneath his sleeve.
"Have you and Yuna quarrelled?" he asked in a sharp voice, skipping the particulars as was his way. Suspicion clawed at him, and it was all directed towards the Acolyte.
Shelinda drew a breath, preparing for a long answer. "Your daughter is a gentle girl, Sir. But she is grown very eccentric. Do you know she walks the house like a ghost at night? It is not dreamwalking for I am sure she is quite lucid. Why, I am sure I once saw her wandering the little garden in the dark! What am I to think of a young girl behaving in such a way? Her mealtimes are quite bizarre; I am not used to preparing food at such ungodly hours. And that Fiend of a cat seems to enjoy making my life a misery! I would advise you to be rid of the animal before it turns savage." The maid's chest rose and fell with a desperate gulp of air. "To be frank, Sir, respect is what is missing."
"I see," said Auron coldly, deceptively calm as the insult to his daughter struck home. "If that is the way you feel, of course you may leave whenever you like. I will arrange the rest of your pay to be delivered."
"No need, Sir," she said proudly, thin-lipped. It was evident to him that she had not expected such a curt response, but he was in no temper to encourage her. When she paused in the doorway he felt an angry flicker of impatience. "A gentleman called at the house. He did not give a name but left a Sphere in your care. You will find it in the resting room."
The door clicked noisily shut as she left. The sound seemed to drain the tension from Auron all at once. Wearily he relinquished his travel bags and katana, the weight off his shoulders blissful, and poured over Shelinda's words in his mind, trying to make sense of them.
He had little doubt that Yuna's sleeplessness was a symptom of his absence. Indeed she never took to "walking the house like a ghost at night" when he was installed there; he would sense her movements in a heartbeat. But Yuna herself had admitted no serious anxiety when he asked. For the rest she could not be at fault. There was nothing lacking in her manner; she was gentle, respectful, polite to a fault and from what he had witnessed of Zanarkand, ages more mature than her peers. I will go upstairs, break the news to Yuna, and set about finding a more suitable companion for the two of us.
In the resting room, Auron removed his overcoat, wincing as he peeled the material from his injured hand. He shook the garment out and set it carefully on the back of a chair.
The Sphere was sitting on the dining table, humming softly. Auron activated it absentmindedly, imagining a message on his property in Besaid, or else a Crusader communication come too soon.
Instead, the face that flickered into being struck him like lightening on the dry earth.
"Sir Auron," came the Sphere's voice. "I believe you will know my face. I have kept my silence, as you bid me all those years ago. Now my conscience compels me to act, for your sake and your daughter's."
Immediately Auron found himself gripping the edge of the table at the reference to Yuna, knuckles white. He sat down hard, real raw fear gripping his stomach for the first time in years.
"Many secrets pass through the walls of my establishment," the voice continued, direct and unrelenting, each falling word a new blow to Auron. "I fear that the truth about Braska's Guardian may soon fall into the wrong hands. Listen well."
--
Yuna
--
Yuna turned the Summoner's staff over and over in her hands. She smoothed the fudge-like polish down the length of it and back again to the centerpiece, massaging the twin red-on-gold wings until they shone. It is such a beautiful ornament. How many times has it alienated me? Yetshe remembered when her father had it made for her, how right it had felt in her hands from the first.
As though summoned by her thoughts, Yuna's bedroom door swung open with a soft click.
Her smile fled when she caught sight of Auron's hand glistening redly. She dropped the staff and polish both, forgotten in an instant, to guide her father into the woven Besadian chair by the window.
"Oh Father," she said sadly, "I wish you would take more care."
She left him there and swiftly sought out the wooden box in her chest of drawers which held a mixture of Al Bhed potions and ether, troubled by her father's uncharacteristic silence. But when she moved to dab the wound, Auron clamped his good hand over her wrist, meeting her eyes with seriousness. "Listen to me. We cannot stay here any longer."
She jerked back, ether sloshing from the bottle in her hand. "Father, calm down. What are you saying?"
"We will leave B-North tonight and take up residence elsewhere."
She regarded him carefully; he seemed to be speaking more to himself than to her. "Father, I think you have a fever. I can't understand what you're saying. You're not making sense."
"I am in earnest, Yuna. I need you to gather your things."
Yuna gripped his hand. "Tonight?"
The resounding silence met by her question sent a stab of hot fear through Yuna. Oh no. Oh no no no no. This can't be happening. "Father," she implored, "This is our home now."
As quickly as she had forsaken her dream of Zanarkand, Yuna felt herself clawing desperately for reasons to keep it alive. "We're going to abandon the house?" she continued, "just like that? Our breakfast table by the window? Kimahri's crawlspaces… the Besaidian star you carved on my headboard? All the new memories we made?" And the heart of it, always. "My garden…"
And she thought about the purple robed Hibiscus glowing at dusk; the blades of wild deep-green grass; the reaching ivy and the wrought-iron gates she had conquered. She thought of Tidus' lonely silhouette in the night air, waiting.
"I'll carve you a new star." Her father's weak smile was not without tenderness. "And now we must find a house with a better garden. I'm sorry, Yuna."
She didn't smile back. Part of her wanted to run, run from all of it, her father's past and her Summoner's staff, from the stinging sadness that surrounded their life. Yet even as her heart thundered profoundly in her chest, even as she felt control slipping desperately through her fingers, something in her father's voice gave Yuna pause.
"Father," she said tentatively, "are you in trouble?"
AUTHOR'S NOTES
I could tell you what the next chapter is called, but it would be too obvious. So I won't. However, know only that there will be much facing up to things coming up... almost every character will get a slap in the face, except Lulu of course because she's too sensible.
I think anyone who is still reading this is probably past the point of commenting on the ridiculously long update waits. But to anyone who still needs explanation, I'm truly sorry it always takes so long, I just don't let this story take over my life, it's a little hobby of mine and nothing more. But know that I don't plan to give up on it.
I can't believe I didn't update in 2009 though. I seriously thought I did, guys. Jesus.
The main problem with writing a story over this many years is that my writing changes and improves and deteriorates... I look back and find myself embarassed by certain chapters. I need to seriously go back and re-edit when I have time. But first I'll try to finish this. Stop laughing!