Inundation
She wanted to cry.
It was the first thing Yuna thought of when she stood on the beach dancing and trembling softly, calling out to the spirits around her, go! Go home, to peace. It was too much, the stench of death around and clinging to her, hanging in the salty air like some filthy blanket tossed down by a child onto its defenseless toys. Death, covering everything. The tears burned her eyes and throat, and she thought for a moment of being like Tidus, free to scream her anguish and rage out into an unfeeling sky– but then there was Seymour, watching her. And she knew that this was the place only for what she had to do.
And it disgusted her. The bodies, the Maesters standing there stonefaced as though this were a routine ceremony at some temple, the way she danced without remorse in her step when her whole heart was soaking in it, the entirety of her being swayed by it.
It was all so inhuman, so detached and alien. Unnatural. She was a child, should be bawling her eyes out at the carnage. Only a child. How many of the dead had been nothing more themselves?
After that thought, it hurt too much. The second thing she could remember being aware of was shutting down her mind completely and simply mimicking the motions of so many Sendings before, this time somehow more grotesque, a parody of her usual grace.
But later, when they had all gone and no one was watching her, she sunk into a corner and sobbed until it ached in her chest, made breathing painful. She could feel her face, hot and sticky with tears that finally slowed to a sluggish trickle, and she wondered how many nights all this sickness– because that was what grief was, really, a kind of plague– had been held inside her, waiting for one horror significantly brutal enough to burst the dams of her dignity. She wondered why she held it in at all. Strange, her newfound curiosity about things that should have been taken for granted. It was Tidus, she decided eventually, who had started all this.
The questioning that had suddenly wedged itself into her consciousness and made her life so hard. Why? With a sniffle, Yuna almost smiled.
She would have to remember to thank him. And...
Maybe someday, when she was allowed to cry in front of someone else, they could mourn together.