Beside the Rolling Sea
:Chapter I:
The walk home seemed longer to Liora, with a heavy silence hanging between her and Auron. She'd made several attempts at conversation, but he seemed to have something on his mind. Neither spoke until she was afraid he might walk right past the house, and reminded him they were there.
"Liora," he said quietly, stopping her at the gate. "You should know, Jecht asked me only to raise the boy. If he will not have me, I fear I have wasted time for both of us."
Her eyes stared straight back at him, almost with a grim amusement. "If Tidus doesn't want you around, he'll learn to deal with it."
The folds of fabric hiding Auron's mouth twitched; it could have been either a smile or a frown. Ignoring the ambiguous gesture, she took his arm and conducted him to the door. Tidus flew out of it.
"Mother!"
"What have you been up to, Tidus?" she asked, ruffling his hair as he hugged her waist. "Scaring off visitors, again?"
One blue eye peered up at Auron, the other half of the impish face hidden, and the child drew away from his mother. "You're that man from earlier!"
"Tidus, where are your manners?" Liora laughed embarrassedly. "This is Auron. He might be staying with us awhile."
"But you said you weren't going to leave me with a babysitter!"
"He's not a babysitter– look, why don't we go inside, instead of standing here arguing for the whole street to see? Tidus, go clear off the table so we can have lunch."
Standing back from the scene, Auron took in Liora's scolding, the fatigued way she sent Tidus off with a smack, and the boy's last spurning glance back at Auron as he went, defeated, into the house. This was a world of carefully constructed order, of routine and well-established harmony, where strangers never called. Stepping into that and uprooting this half-family's last anchor seemed wrong, and he didn't know what to do.
Then with an apologetic smile, Liora tugged politely at his sleeve and led him inside. It occurred to him only in that moment that there was nothing to do but what he must–what she so openly invited him to. At least she welcomed him enough that he would have a chance, in time, to win over Tidus' trust.
Lunch was light, punctuated by awkward conversation. Liora quizzed Auron about where he had lived before, whether he was married, had he any experience with children? All very politely, of course, but it felt like the most rigorous of interrogations, and the whole time, Tidus scrutinized him with a cynical gaze. His expression was as a child's, though: completely open, and what was there to see was an ocean of hostility, and even greater pain. Auron found it difficult to focus on Liora's inquiries rather than her fascinating– if not a bit daunting– child.
"Auron was a friend of your father, Tidus," she said carefully, seeming to hope for some sort of fond recognition, or at least not the distasteful "Oh." which she got in return.
Silently, Auron observed the battle of wills between mother and child: Liora, pushing Tidus to accept a perfect stranger on faith; Tidus' natural mistrust in someone who dropped out of the blue. At last it was broken by the boy's standing, with a prominent scraping of chair legs against hardwood floors, and declaring, "I'm going to my room."
From Liora's quiet look of disapproval at the dismissive attitude, it was impossible to tell whether this signaled a victory or a concession made in the name of "retreat to fight another day". Indeed, an intriguing pair. Auron offered no sympathetic smile to Liora as the clomping footsteps of a seven-year-old's pout echoed from the hall, growing fainter. Instead, he reached out a hand, and she almost looked relieved at the cordial gesture– like he would give an equal. Her face creased into a half-crescent of congeniality; she took his outstretched hand and pressed it.
"What a relief. I worry about him sometimes, home alone all day, with no one to talk to. One has to wonder what a child gets to thinking, like that." The dogged agedness was back in her eyes, lined her brow faintly. She looked his own age, and he felt that in some respects, she was even older.
Perhaps he could allow her to reclaim something of herself. He was nothing of a nanny, but a mentor and at least guiding force he would become in the interests of her son. How odd, that what he did for Tidus really had everything to do with what he owed to the memory of a dead man and the suffering of his widow.
"I will do what I can, Liora."
"Whatever you can do places me deeply in your debt, Auron."
A moment of regarding each other, and she became distant again, offering to show him to the door (he said nothing of the fact that her house was hardly big enough to get slightly misdirected in). He agreed, and for the second time that day, they parted to leave him with the workings of a new life on his mind.
If the ramshackle house had seemed dingy, at least on the inside it carried the cheery airs of a lived-in place something of a home. His hotel room could hardly claim to clean sheets and working electricity– in the interest of expenses, he'd paid the least he could and gotten an according abode. The air had sea-must in it, though everything seemed to in Zanarkand. With a sigh, he lowered himself to a chair placed by the single, filmy window.
Outside, the sea crashed and rumbled. He could hear it in his head.
Clouds were gathering; a storm, no doubt. The two days he'd been here the city's famously benevolent weather seemed to have vanished. Perhaps it would return once the turmoil of a new resident had worn off.
Speaking of residency, it occurred to him that he had no permanent home. Liora would perhaps agree to his living with them for a time, but it would be nothing but a stress on the already tense relationship the three of them were forming. A more personal arrangement was in order, should be seen about soon.
But the day was fading into evening as he allowed memory to wash over him, like a pleasant way of drowning. Jecht, and Braska; everything he'd been so attuned to, so in love with in the moment, the glamour of life...it had all passed and become a series of whitewashed recollections. He couldn't help but wonder at the nature and purpose of all he was doing now, for the sake of a long since ineffectual past. Even what seemed like his current life would eventually be a set of memories attached to names that no longer called up roiling emotions inside him, places the color and climate of which could not be summoned up into a dream's reality at one sight or smell to reincarnate the distant past.
The sensation that took him at that thought could almost be described by something so frivolous as longing.
But he had no sense for frivolities, nor the time or taste.