Blustering and impatient, the wind began to pick up as soon as Riku, Tidus, and Sora had finished with breakfast. Outside, Graya had already spread sand over the fire-pit, and now she was orbiting about the table, cleaning up the remains of their meal with the unusual gusto that she showed for all her day-to-day tasks. Really though, with Sora at the table there was not a great deal left to clean up; if it could be eaten, it had been. An entire empty watermelon rind sat proudly on his plate, like a trophy to his gastric prowess.

"You should mount that on your wall," Tidus heard Riku send to Sora, echoing his own thoughts.

Tidus tilted his chair onto two legs and studied the ceiling. It sported a hand-carved crest with Riku's parent's initials—gilded—at its center. Briefly he wished that he had the kind of money that they poured into things like this. Not that Riku's family had ever been anything but nice to him, indeed much nicer than they had any cause to be, considering the circumstances. But maybe that was it. Maybe they felt a little guilty…

A sudden darkening distracted Tidus. He frowned at the iron gray clouds through the delicately frosted glass window that formed most of one wall. He had hoped that they would have a day or two of good weather, but the way it looked now, they would be lucky if they had the whole morning. Practicing outside was definitely out of the question.

"The weather's gone shitty, and we have a ton of practicing to do. Any idea where we can go?" he asked the others.

"There's room in the studio now," Sora replied, "We could go there."

Along with the response came a wash of feelings and sensory images that, Tidus had found, was characteristic of one of them referring to something of special significance. For a brief moment Tidus saw the empty studio with dust motes floating in strong afternoon light that made the wooden walls and floors look warm and mellow. Several smells dominated the sending: bread, lilac, fresh paint, old socks, wood shavings.

"Or I suppose we could use the basement," added Riku, "if we have to."

Riku's sending was sharply in contrast to Sora's. The image was dark and chilly. Sheets covered most of the old weightlifting equipment stored in the basement—equipment that had belonged to Riku's brother—and shadows blanketed the corners of the room. It smelled strongly of old sweat, rubber, medicine, and disuse. Tidus could also feel Riku's reluctance to use it. He didn't like being down there, and indeed his parents liked it less. There were too many memories packed away on those shelves.

The choice was obvious. "Let's train the studio, if you mom will let us," Tidus said out loud, "There's more room and we're less likely to be interrupted."

"She won't mind, no one will be staying there until the rainy season is over," Sora said standing up. "Let's get out of here, if we hurry we can make it before everyone hits the streets."

"Thank you, Graya," Tidus said, before they left.

The three crossed the little cove that sheltered Riku's house until they reached the edge of the lapping water. They followed the beach up the side of the island, the village steadily rising into view over their heads. The little island city had been built on a seaside cliff for protection from the violent ocean storms that occasionally thrashed this part of the Destiny Islands. Long ago several stairs had been carved into the rock face, permitting access by foot. Supplies and boatloads of tourists were normally hoisted up the cliff by giant pulleys. In the event that both of these means failed there was also a damp and winding tunnel leading from the base of the cliff up under the main street of the village.

Visitors called the white cliffs the diamond shore. Both the stone that hung above and the sand that stretched out below reflected the sun like fragmented glass. On the very best of days, which today was not, no one on the ocean would have seen the three boys as they crept along the base of the cliff—lost in a maelstrom of light—and disappeared into a small dark opening.

Sora was unusually focused as he led the others through the steep and winding tunnel that jackknifed its way to the village. If his friends had seen his eyes they would have noticed them glittering strangely in the soft and dim light of the tunnel lamps. As it was, Riku and Tidus found themselves making idle conversation to fill the unusual silence.

"He's really intent about this," Riku finally breathed, leaning over Tidus' shoulder.

Tidus nodded. He couldn't remember ever seeing Sora this focused about anything, not even their Paopu escapade. Tidus was often paranoid—thought for good reason, his life up to this point had been anything but easy and happy—still, it didn't seem far-fetched to think that when practice actually did start he was going to get his ass royally kicked.

Tidus was only six years old when he moved to the island with his mother from a large and urban archipelago on the extreme end of the Destiny Islands following the death of his grandfather. A notoriously cantankerous and reclusive man, he had chosen to live in the middle of nowhere and the house he left them, a two story, ramshackle affair perched on a hill, was a distance from of the small village and screened off by many layers of trees and a tangle of underbrush.

Ramshackle and out of the way or not, the house was still the best place Tidus had ever lived in. His first six years had been spent in a succession of smelly and cramped apartments that he had been forced to share with his mother's co-workers and their children. His mother was currently down in the village, shopping for food and looking for potential clients to restart her business, and Tidus was left to his own devices for almost the entire day. For the first hour, at least, he ran up and down the house opening and shutting all the doors over and over, and exploring room after room until he was quite out of breath.

Tidus crashed through a door and slipped on a wrinkle in the carpet. Slammed suddenly against the wall, he stopped running and looked around, bent over and panting. He had emerged into a small but very bright second-story room with two large oval windows that overlooked the garden below. It was, arguably, the best view in the house. He stood upright and looked around again.

"Mom said to pick a room and I want this one!" he shouted happily to the half empty house. He started bouncing from one end of the room to the other. Tidus was ecstatic; he had never had a good view before, or even a window for that mater, in any of the rooms that he had shared.

When his new room was fully bounced in, Tidus ran downstairs and outside to have a better look at the garden. It was weedy and overrun of course, his grandfather had not been able to maintain it for many years, but there was still a strange elegance to it that was quite lost on the six-year-old, who sat down in the middle of what had once been a circle of Hibiscus plants and promptly starting digging a hole.

Tidus didn't look up when he heard a soft rustling noise in the bushes behind him, but he did stop digging. The noise grew louder as the source of the interruption drew closer. He turned around just in time to see two heads pop out of the bushes and then pull back immediately—someone was spying on him.

He waited. Soon the rustling resumed, and this time all of the two young boys emerged from the bushes. One had very awkward brown hair and the other lanky silver. Tidus caught himself staring; the brown haired boy's eyes were startlingly blue, almost like gemstones caught in the moonlight. They appeared to be a year or two older than Tidus. Straightening up they walked over to him, looking down at where he sat.

"What'cha doing?" the brown haired one asked, curious.

"Nothing," Tidus said defensively. He had been digging for treasure. Hopefully if he ignored them long enough they would go away and he could get back to it.

"You're digging a hole," the silver haired one pointed out. "You don't do that for no reason."

"I live here, I can dig a hole if I want to."

"You live here?" said the first boy suddenly. "Does that mean that old Ratmuffler is really dead?"

"It's Rathmuster," said Tidus, finally getting annoyed, "and yes, he's dead. He was my grandfather, I think."

"Oh," said the first boy, abashed.

"It's OK, I never met him," Tidus quickly added.

"He used to yell at us a lot for sneaking around here," said the second boy suddenly, with a gleam in his eye, "He actually started throwing shoes at us at one point. I think he hid a treasure around here somewhere and he didn't want us to find it."

Tidus tried to look innocent—so far his plan wasn't working very well.

"My name's Riku," continued the silver haired boy, "and this is Sora. What's your name?"

Tidus didn't answer; instead he tried to think of a good fake name. But, for some reason, all he could come up with was Dirjiban, and he was pretty sure they wouldn't buy that. Reluctantly he settled on the truth.

"Mine's Tidus," he said.

"That's a good name," said Sora, sitting down next to him and glancing into the hole, "What does it mean?"

"Mean?" Tidus asked, confused. "I don't know names meant things."

"Sure," Sora continued, "parents sometimes name their kids in an old language that they used to speak around here. My name means "sky," because Mom liked it and it was my grandpa's name. Riku's name is "earth," but that's an accident."

"It's not!" Riku protested, "My dad's name is Royo and my mom's is Koyhi. They put them together, and that made Rohi, but they changed it because that means "waste" and that's a bad name. They knew exactly what Riku meant."

"See," said Sora, "a complete accide—"

He was cut off suddenly by Riku, who pounced on top of him and pulled his shirt over his face. He started tickling Sora's sides, and Sora started to squirm.

"Stop it. Stop!" Sora cried between laughs, completely out of breath.

"Say it," said Riku.

"No."

"Say it or I'll never stop."

"Fine. Your name isn't an accident."

"And?"

"And what?"

"And what about this morning."

"Ugh. And you're a faster swimmer than me, too. Happy?"

"Yes," Riku said, sliding off of Sora, "just so long as you remember the facts."

Tidus no longer knew what to make of the two boys. "Um, I don't think Tidus means anything," he said.

"That's OK," said Sora pulling his shirt back down, "most people's names don't mean anything anyway."

"By the way if you're looking for treasure, we already checked here," said Riku politely.

Tidus looked over at him, "Huh?"

"We've checked everywhere in the garden, except under the pond and some of the largest trees. We usually come here every night, when we can sneak away."

Tidus hadn't realized that he was being that obvious. Thinking the strange situation over a little bit, Tidus decided to take a risk.

"Where haven't you checked yet?" he asked.

Riku looked at Tidus closely and broke into a grin, "There are lots of places we can't get to, but we think the he probably hid something in the basement. You want to go check it out?"

What they heck, Tidus thought, it might be fun. "Come on," he said, standing up.

For the next several hours the three boys rummaged around the dusty and ancient basement of Tidus' late grandfather's house. While they didn't find any treasure, they did find lots of other things that, in their minds, were almost as good.

"Hey, look at this!" exclaimed Sora, after he finally broke into the huge black cupboard that turned out to be entirely filled hundreds of unused fishing lures and roll after roll of bandages.

"That's nothing, look at what I found," said Riku proudly. Tidus looked up from the thirty or so uniquely shaped glass bottles he had found under the floorboards, each filled with a different color of sand. Riku was standing next to an upended crate filled with wooden swords, staves, and bows.

"Wow," Tidus said. He had had no idea what a cool old man his grandfather had been.

"These are ton better than the practice weapons we make ourselves!" said Riku excitedly. "I bet that if we use these we can beat everyone."

"You already beat everyone," Sora pointed out, "including that kid who was three years older than you."

"Yah, but with these we can beat everyone-everyone. Those other things break if you look at them too hard. These won't."

Tidus hopped over to the crate, nearly tripping over a knapsack full of canned tuna in the process. "You guys fight each other?" he asked.

Sora grinned, "Sure, there's a whole island for it and everything. The thing is, though, they won't let us have real weapons, so we have to make them ourselves, but if we sneak these over, they'll never know."

Riku and Sora looked each other in the eyes for a moment and nodded.

"Come with us, and we'll show you the secret cave we found. We can hide our stuff there," said Riku eagerly.

Tidus thought for a moment about the kind of kids he had been forced to live with for the past six years, and the rather painful fact that he had never made any friends. He brightened up; Problem number one solved.

"Great!" he said, leaning down to pickup one of the swords. "Where do we go?"

CRACK!

Sora leaped back as Riku's heavy wooden practice sword came crashing into the floor just inches in front of him. His passage stirred up a cloud of dust motes that twirled through the light streaming through the studio like so many lovesick fireflies. To his left Tidus swung his stave out in a wide, low arc, trying to catch Riku off guard and knock his legs out from underneath him. Riku jumped over the wooden pole like he was skipping rope, completely ignoring Tidus, his attention focused on finding a hole in the rain of blows Sora was sending his way.

That mistake would prove to be his downfall.

Tidus stepped back, took a breath, and focused once again on the warm little link inside of him. The contact was hard to maintain for very long at the level they needed, even with practice and concentration. Normally being linked was like swimming in a fast-moving river of sunlight, now it was like trying to juggle at the same time. However, practice and patience made it a little smoother each time they tried.

Tidus felt Sora's mind dip into his. It was a shocking little feeling, kind of like being spun around and thoroughly kissed by someone you had not known was standing behind you. Ignoring the flood of thoughts, memories, and emotions—which, at this point, would only distract him—he focused instead what Sora's body was planning to do in the next second and a half.

Sora swung his sword toward Riku's shoulder. Riku quickly blocked the blow, rebounding it downward. At the same time Tidus jabbed his staff forward, just behind the downward rebound of Riku's own sword. Riku didn't have time to block it. The stave hit his calf and knocked him just a little off balance in the direction of Sora's own sword, which whipped back and cracked Riku on the side of the head.

Riku crumpled to the ground. So, incidentally, did Tidus and Sora.

"Ouch," Sora said quietly.

"You both forgot to block the pain, again," Riku growled, sitting up. "This won't work if you don't try and block the pain. We can't have all three of us going down when one of us gets hurt."

Tidus held the sides of his head, which was ringing like a doorbell. For seven days they had been at this, always two linked together against a third.

"You were doing really well until that last part," added Riku. "I could tell, it's getting harder and harder for me to stay out of your link."

Sora straightened up. "Were going to have to find someone else we can practice against. Just two of us linked together aren't going to cut it at the tournament. But first, we need to get pain blocking down."

Or they could just forget the tournament and give up. Tidus had mentioned this once, the day they had discovered the pain-sharing problem. He hadn't been thinking at all. Sora had given him a haunted look, curled up into a ball, and silently—gently—cried for almost an hour. All his friends could do was sit and wait. Tidus had felt like an idiot, both he and Riku knew what this was really about. This was proof, if nothing else was, that sharing a person's mind and heart doesn't prevent you from hurting him. Tidus didn't bring up the possibly of quitting after that.

The three boys stood up and were readying themselves for another round, when Tidus heard the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs outside the studio. Was it already that time? Practices always seemed to move quickly. Sora's mother knocked on the door. "Can I come in?" she asked.

Sora looked up, dropping his stance. "No mom! We're all naked and sweaty."

"Oh, well in that case" she said and came in anyway.

"Mom! What if we had been naked?" Sora said, pulling his face into a fake expression of horror.

"I wouldn't have minded," she said, smiling at Riku, who was looking a little redder than normal and suddenly expressed a great interest in examining the crossbar of his sword. Tidus choked down a laugh and internally he heard Sora chuckling.

"Mom only says that because she knows it makes him uncomfortable. She used to give us baths together when we came home muddy. She's been taking care of him since he was three," Sora sent.

"Food?" Sora asked pointedly. The coming of Sora's mom usually signaled the advent of lunch.

"You think about your stomach too much," she said, poking him in the belly. "If you didn't play like a hurricane you'd be fat by now. I was coming up to ask Tidus if he was hungry—I knew that you were."

Tidus found himself blushing. Besides Riku's parents, Sora's mom was the only other person on the island who cared about him, and unlike Riku's parents she had been helping him out since the very beginning. "Thank you Prea," he said—Sora's mom insisted that he call her by her first name, "we're extremely hungry." His stomach punctuated the sentence with a growl.

She chuckled. "I thought so. Food is waiting downstairs."

Each morning Tidus awoke early, along with the other island children, and trotted off to school. His two best friends, Riku and Sora, were in the grade ahead of him. (Since the island was small, students were lumped together into grades rather liberally.) Tidus dreaded school—though not for the typical reasons, he liked learning, liked it rather obsessively in fact—but a resolve born from stubbornness and the desire to see his friends propelled him forward in spite of what he knew he would have to face.

He walked down the hill and through the trees to the outskirts of the village below. The school was near the center of town, only a few blocks away, and with any luck he would make it there before he ran into anyone.

Unfortunately, luck was not on his side today.

A tall, brown-haired boy, about three years Tidus' senior stepped out into the alleyway just in front of him. Tidus didn't know the kid specifically, but he had a pretty good idea where he was from. Every year one of the school clicks (the less polite said gangs) initialized its newbe recruits by sending them through an "ordeal." While the challenges changed from year to year, the core of the test had been the same for a while now: harass Tidus.

"I thought we told you not to come back here, bastard…" started the newbe.

Tidus didn't let him finish. Seven years of this had taught enough to know when he didn't want to be part of a conversation. More importantly, though, seven years of training with Riku had taught him how to stop the conversation quite handily. Tidus reared back and punched the newbe directly in the face, then turned around and sprinted the other way, before whoever had been judging from afar realized what had happened.

Tidus was nowhere near Riku's level, or even Sora's for that matter, but he was still one of the better young fighters on the island.

Skirting closer to the main street, Tidus decided that it was safer to risk going through a crowd, he only had two blocks to go. Still sprinting he burst into the marketplace, darting around fruit vendors and clothing carts. People stopped to look at him as he ran by. He heard a wave of whispers building up behind him, threatening to smoother him in gossip. If he were lucky he'd make it out before wave broke.

Tidus was jerked back, his arm nearly snapping as a thick hand attacked to a jellyroll arm clamped down on his wrist. Tidus was forced to the ground and a fat, smelly face lowered itself into his field of vision. When the puckered mouth opened a gale of rotten fish and tobacco emerged and Tidus' face was splattered with dribble.

"What did you steal?" demanded the fat face.

"I didn't steal anything, I'm late for school," Tidus said, trying to be calm as he struggled to break free of the hand.

"Liar!" the fat face roared, "I know who you are. You're a lying, thieving, little bastard and you were running away from something. What did you take?"

"I didn't steal anything—" Tidus started, before a fat, beefy fist slammed into his face.

"Lie to me again and I'll hit you twice as hard!" growled the fat man as he started to paw through Tidus' pockets. They were empty. Tidus had learned long ago not to carry anything with him to and from school.

"What the hell do you think you're doing," came a shocked, but familiar voice.

Tidus looked up at the sound, Sora's mother was threading her way through the crowd toward the fat vendor who currently held Tidus hostage.

"You can't do that," she said, her face a mask of rage.

The fat man stood up. "This boy is a thief," he proclaimed.

"What did you see him steal?"

"I caught him running away."

"What did you see him steal?" Sora's mom demanded again. The fat man was at least three times her size, but he still seemed to shrink under the ferocity of her gaze.

The fat man, realizing he was loosing, tried a different tactic. "You know what this boy is and what his mother does, we'd be better off without them both. And I don't need to see him steal to know that he did," he sneered.

Sora's mother gave Tidus a sidelong glance. He realized he was missing his opportunity. The vendor was blustering and starting to get red in the face. As quick as he was able, Tidus jumped to his feet and darted out of marketplace.

"You see! You see!" came the enraged voice from behind him, but Tidus was already gone.

A few carefully selected streets later Tidus emerged into the relative safety of the school grounds. Most of the teachers didn't like him much better than the townsfolk, but they, at least, were honor bound not to show it. Adjusting his now wrinkled and dirty clothes, and trying to ignore the black eye that was forming on his face, Tidus walked into the school just as the first bell rang.

"OK, everyone get ready, she'll be here in a few minutes," sent Sora. Today they had stopped their usual practicing a couple of minutes early.

On schedule, Tidus heard Prea's footsteps coming up the stairs. She knocked on the door. "Can I come in?" she called.

Sora looked up, grinning. "No mom! We're all naked and sweaty."

"Don't start that again," she said, stepping into the room. Sora's mom paused, and left the room quite quickly, closing the door behind her.

"I warned you," Sora called in between laughs, dropping the very carefully positioned wooden sword he had been holding in front of himself.

"I'm gonna go after her," he sent, and ducked out the door.

Tidus set down the shield he had been carrying and started to pull on his clothes. Riku was already tugging a shirt over his head. When you had been sharing your heart and soul with two people for more than six months, things like privacy and modesty hardly seemed to mater any more. The others already knew far more about Tidus that seeing his body could ever tell them, and vice-versa. Indeed, in a certain sense they were all always naked.

The others teased him sometimes because these situations—like the time Riku had walked on him taking a bath without so much a hello—still made him a little uncomfortable. He had to admit, their way of looking at it made a lot of sense. Tidus just chalked up his remaining embarrassment to a side effect of his upbringing.

There was a shrill scream downstairs and the sound of bare feet running quickly up the stairs. Sora burst through the door, slammed it behind him, and leaned against it with his entire weight.

Riku looked up, "I'm impressed," he said, "I didn't know you could blush that far down." Tidus just giggled.

Sora spoke between raggedy breaths, "The mayor—and his daughter—were having lunch—downstairs."

Several, very wearisome hours later Tidus arrived back at his house, slammed the door shut, and dropped the bag he was carrying onto the table. Leaning against the wall he sank to the ground and put his head in his hands: one violent assault, two bullies, one black eye, countless whispers, and—of course—the usual barrage of insults. It had been a very full day.

By this point Tidus was certain that he had been called every variation of "dirty little bastard" that was grammatically possible and several that weren't, and he was definitely sick of them all. He was bitterly tired of people coming up to him in the hall and telling him that his mom was a whore.

It didn't ease his mind any to know that it was true. This was just another typical day for the son of the village prostitute.

"My mom is a whore," Tidus thought to himself, resentfully. For just a second his emotions threatened to waver, but he brushed them aside and stood up. He had work to do.

He was really looking forward to spending the evening with Riku and Sora, but if he was going to have enough time to do that, there were many things he had to take care of first.

Stepping into the kitchen, Tidus lit a fire underneath the ancient gas stove—the pilot had gone out again. He turned on the faucet and waited for water to bubble out. He wrinkled his noise as it came up yellow and went to collect some eggs, letting it run for a while.

He began to rummage through the bag he had brought with him, thinking about Sora's mother. The bag was from her; he couldn't do any shopping on his own anymore. No one wanted Tidus or his mother to be here, and they seemed to think that if they just beat on him enough they would both go away. Instead he snuck into the bakery where Sora and his mom lived and worked and gave her a list of things they needed and some money.

"Let me look at your eye," she said at once. Tisking over the swelling flesh she fished into the freezer and quickly assembled a bag of ice, which she gently pressed against his eye. "You shouldn't risk going through the market if people are going to treat you like that."

A loud bang from upstairs disturbed Tidus' thoughts. He didn't look up; it was often best not to look too closely at his mother's "clients" as they left. However, Tidus risked a tiny glance as the man waked out the door, pulling his shirt over his head. It was the same dirty-blond haired man who had been here for the past week.

Quickly putting a kettle on the stove, Tidus began brewing a small mixture of herbs and flower petals from a jar on the icebox. In just a few minutes he knew he would hear a familiar sound.

"Tidus?" came a gravely mew from upstairs.

Tidus finished assembling the tea tray he had been putting together and, balancing it on one hand, worked his way up the stairs to his mother's bedroom. It smelled foul inside the room—she never let him clean in here—and heavy curtains blocked the light. Tidus made no move to open them; instead he just set the tea tray next to his mother's bed on a small table. By the looks of the empty gin bottles and overturned pipes of who-knows-what she would need her hangover cure.

Tidus had found the recipe one day while rummaging through his grandfather's old books in the basement. He half suspected that it had saved his mother's life more than once—in addition to curing hangovers it also detoxified the body.

"Thanks Tidus," she said, sipping the herbal mixture, "I don't know what I would do without you."

Tidus turned to leave.

"Oh, honey," she started. Tidus stopped and turned around.

"Yes mom?"

"You know that nice man, Mr. Kaliguelah who's been staying at our house?"

She must mean the man with the dirty-blond hair. His mother still pretended that Tidus thought they were running a temporary boarding house—he had figured out the truth when he was eight. He nodded.

His mother giggled. "He asked me out on a date tonight. I have to get ready. He really is such a nice man. You'll have to take care of yourself tonight, is that alright?"

"Of course mom," he said. Tidus took care of himself, and the house, every night.

His mother stumbled out of bed and planted a wet kiss on his forehead. "I have to get ready," she said again, heading for the spring outside. Tidus watched her leave and sighed as the door closed. Hopefully, if he got all of his chores done, he could spend time with Riku and Sora.

For once, it looked like the world might be on Tidus' side. He was able to finish up his chores well before evening, and his mother departed for points unknown soon afterward. Free of responsibilities, and with the house to himself, Tidus changed into his practice outfit and carefully made his way toward the tiny public boats docked near Children's Isle.

It was almost midnight by the time Tidus returned. Taking advantage of his mother's outing—thought he wasn't sure she would notice if he didn't come back at all—he had stayed out late on the tiny neighboring isle to watch the stars with his friends.

It had been an odd, bittersweet moment for Tidus. Sora and Riku never exactly brought up his mother, or the reason that the other kids and townsfolk hated him. But Sora in particular had the uncanny ability to discuss something that needed to be said without referring to it directly. They had ended up talking about it anyway, and it helped as much as anything did.

Both of his friends and their parents did whatever they could to protect him, but they couldn't be everywhere at once. Tidus had rolled over all of this in his mind while the three of them lay on their backs on the beach sand, whispering of secrets dreams, and counting the stars.

The house was quiet when Tidus got back. Not surprisingly his mother was still out. Hardly bothering to pull off his clothes, Tidus climbed into his bed and was asleep almost the moment his head touched the pillow. The silence of the house and of the island itself enveloped him like a fog, shrouding him in misty dreams to drive away the harsher realities that lay just on the edge of his consciousness.

The next day, half awake, Tidus ran once again through his daily routine. He got up, dressed, made himself a cold breakfast, and went to school. Thankfully, there were no encounters on the way to or from the schoolhouse. In every way it was the sort of boringly, uneventful morning he often prayed for.

In the kitchen Tidus started frying eggs and pealing fruit for his mother's breakfast. He also put the usual kettle onto the stovetop—no doubt today she would need an extra large dose of her hangover medicine.

He frowned at the jar containing the crushed herbs. It was considerably less full than he remembered it being the day before. Mentally, Tidus added gathering herbs to his daily work list, his mother could hardly function without the mixture. Carefully stirring the eggs he waited for the latest client—Kaliguelah no doubt—to come stumbling, half-naked (or occasionally and very embarrassingly, completely naked) down the stairs.

Seconds passed and turned into minutes. The eggs were beginning to burn. Taking them off the heat and turning off the stove, Tidus assembled this morning's tray. Sometimes a client didn't spend the night, and there was nothing to wake his mother up the next morning, or she may have had so much to drink last night that she was incapable of getting up on her own. Balancing the tray, Tidus reached the top of the steps and knocked on the door.

There was no answer.

Tidus knocked again and still there was no response. Carefully he set down the tray and gingerly opening the door, mindful of all the times he had seen far more than he ever wished too, he looked into his mother's bedroom.

Immediately Tidus stepped back, knocking into the tray and spilling the ceramic cup of herbal tea across the top of the stairs. His eyes widened as he stared through the crack in the doorway.

The room had been ransacked. Bedclothes were strewn everywhere, dresser drawers had been overturned, and half the room had been scattered across the other half. Many things appeared to be missing. Sitting, quite out of place, atop the bare mattress in the center of the room was a small folded piece of brown paper.

Tidus stepped carefully into the room, his mind numb, unsure what to make of anything. He picked up the brown piece of paper and saw that it was a note. Tidus immediately recognized his mother's half-literate scrawl.

DEAR TIDUS,

MR. KALIGUELAH HAS ASKED ME TO RUN AWAY AND MERY HIM. HE SAYS HE HAS A NICE PLACE ON AN OTHER ILAND AND HE KNOWS A WAY HE CAN MAKE LOTS OF MONEY SOON. WE BOTH THINK IT IS BETER IF YOU STAY HERE BECUSE ITS SAFER AND WE DONT HAVE MONEY FOR AN EXTRA TICKET. HE SAYS HE WAS TAKING CARE OF HIMSELF AT YOUR AGE AND I THINK YOU WILL DO JUST FINE.

MOM

Involuntarily Tidus crumpled the note in his hand. This was all that she had left him, four sentences on a dirty piece of paper? She hadn't even said that she loved him. She hadn't even mentioned how much she had needed him. This was supposed to be enough?

He couldn't think, he couldn't speak, he couldn't move. He found himself looking down at the floor at an old bra with a stubborn dirty stain that would never come out. Tidus had tried everything, all of his grandfather's cleaning techniques, but it would never come out. So that was what he was, an old piece of dirty clothing that you threw away when it was time to move on. Or maybe he was like the dirt, a stubborn streak that never becomes clean no mater how much you scrub. Just the same, she had thrown him away.

Tidus felt his carefully constructed world of lies, half-truths, and self-deceptions cave in around him. Disgust and self-loathing started to well up from deep inside. For a moment he felt like he was surrounded by a thousand voices, a thousand faces, looking at him, whispering. After all, isn't this what he was? What good comes to the son of a whore? No matter how hard he tried, he would always be a bastard, and a bastard's destiny would find him.

His hand opened on its own accord, and the little brown note that he had crumpled into a ball fell toward the floor, slamming into the carpet with the sound of a thousand waves hitting the shore. Tidus felt only one single instinct, the urge to hide.

He threw himself out of the bedroom and down the stairs, stepping on the teacup and shattering it into a hundred razor-edged pieces. Down the steps, into the hall, through another door, and into the basement he ran, tumbling down the last flight of stairs and letting the door swing closed behind him. Tidus flung himself into the corner of the room like an animal and slid under an old dusty table.

Turning himself around, Tidus huddled under the table, his eye tracing back and forth across the dusty landscape before him. They settled on the only source of light, a little beam lancing in though a broken window in the opposite corner of the room. Tidus looked at that tiny beam of light, watched and waited as it wavered throughout the afternoon, turned red and faded into the dusk. He didn't move, not even when the room was plunged into darkness. Finally a tiny beam of silver moonlight filled the place where the sun had been, yet Tidus still did not move. One single thought, which he was incapable of vocalizing, paralyzed his entire being.

He was alone.

Continued in Chapter 3 of Uncommon Necessities: How to Play a Nocturne (Riku's Story)