A/N: and here is chapter 14--in the same day as chapter 13! OO Must have been Tuesday when I started writing, cause I think the world ended or something. anyway, you know the drill.

DISCLAIMER THAT I FORGOT TO MENTION LAST CHAPTER: I don't own any part of the Final Fantasy franchise except my copies of all the games and my Auron wall scroll. And that bumms me out. And, I'm not poor enough that I would stupidly try to make money of this fanfiction which is using copywritten characters, concepts and places. But its lots of fun to write!
Auron

That had certainly not been my most graceful entrance into the depths of Sin. But Jecht had only been marginally in control of this one.

My head ached, my ears rang, and my eye refused to focus on anything in my field of vision. In short, I felt like I had been sucked into the stomach of a large, city devouring beast and somehow survived the experience. I decided to close my eye and be still until the sensations passed.

"Hey. Hey!" At the shout, I opened my eye again.

Jecht was standing in front of me, looking up at something. I followed the line of his gaze to see Tidus floating above us. He caught sight of Jecht and began swimming toward us.

Just before he would have been able to see me as well, I felt something…shift. The "world" around us was the same, but Tidus was gone.

"This is bad."

"What?" I stood up and walked to Jecht's side. "What is going on?"

"He moved the kid." Jecht turned to me, a worried frown creasing his forehead. "We gotta find him before the spider hurts him."

The spider? Something about that tugged at the back of my mind, demanding that I remember it. But the loss of Jecht's son and the need to find him drove it away. Remembering the past could wait. Finding Tidus and protecting him from Sin's other inhabitant were all that mattered.

When Jecht began to run, I followed--trusting my old friend to guide me through the artificial world inside Sin. His course was unfailingly strait--as if he knew where he was going. Perhaps he did. He'd been living with this other being for ten years; sharing the body might give him some perception of where it was. I would have to ask him later.

We ran on, toward some goal only Jecht could see or feel. As we passed the edge of the illusory Zanarkand, I had to clamp down hard on panic. The odds were not good that we would get to Tidus before he was sent somewhere--anywhere--else. Or worse: killed.

And my boy would be lost to me, along with everyone else who had ever mattered in my life.

I slowed a bit when I realized the path my thoughts had taken. But he was my boy, though I hadn't helped give him life. I had helped shape it. He'd been my family, just as I'd been his.

Picking my pace back up, I ran beside Jecht with a new determination. The monster that lived inside Sin was not going to hurt Tidus. It would not hurt our son.

I managed to hang on to that determination until we found them.

We both froze in our tracks at the sight that greeted us. The spider-being Jecht had been talking about--Yu Yevon some part of my mind supplied--was holding the boy precariously in two tentacles and floating just above a huge black hole in the ground.

I went numb with realization. He's going to drop him, and there won't be anything I can do.

Jecht held out a hand, almost as if he was going to beg the monster to put his son down.

And then it didn't matter. Yu Yevon dropped Tidus into the hole, where he vanished from sight.

"TIDUS!!!" The name was ripped from my throat, as the horror of what had happened dawned on me. It was like losing Braska all over again.

I didn't even know that I'd charged the hole, intending to jump in until I felt Jecht's restraining arms around my waist. "Auron, don't! You won't help him that way!"

I let him drag me away from the hole as Yu Yevon drifted off. With growing sorrow, I watched as the hole closed, sealing away my chance to possibly save the boy.

"We'll find him, Auron." The Blitzer sounded more confident that I could believe. "We just have to go back and look for him. Yu Yevon didn't kill him. All he did was drop him somewhere. We've just got to go looking for him."

The despair I was feeling, thinned a bit with his words. "Are you certain?"

"Sure I'm sure. If he'd killed Tidus, he'd have left the body here, so that he could mock us. But he didn't. All he did was throw him out. So, we just go find him."

His matter-of-factness brought a half-hearted chuckle out of me. "And that's it, huh? Find him, in all of Spira."

"Sure. Shouldn't be too hard. You take the land, and I'll take the water. If I find him, I'll take him to Besaid. If you find him, you find Yuna, and hook up with her and get this thing over."

I was fairly certain that his confidence was forced. He didn't want to think about our only real chance of bringing down Sin for good being lost somewhere in the vastness of Spira. We could search for years and not find him; not until it was too late to stop another Summoner from falling victim to the circle of death Spira was trapped in. But I let myself be pulled in by it. It was that, or give into the despair that threatened to drown me.

"Fine. Drop me off as soon as you think its safe. I need to sleep off this headache."

Jecht grinned. "Now there's the stiff I know and love."

"Hmph." Cushioning my head on my good arm, I forced myself to sleep.