Disclaimer: Don't wanna do this, don't wanna do this…
A/N: review, review, review, review, review
Chapter 2: Massacre
"Ok, just sign your name here, and you'll be registered for the blitzball tournament." The receptionist told Tidus. "Gimme a sec here." He said and shouted to Wakka "OI WAKKA! YOU SIGNATURE IS REQUIRED!" Wakka detached himself from his pep speech to the Aurochs, came bustling over and scrawled his signature messily on the contract.
"Ok, Tidus. Three hours to the match. Practice, or slack?" Wakka asked. Tidus, being the star player of the Zanarkand Abes, felt that there wasn't any need to practice. "Slack." He said, and the duo strode off to the streets of Luca.
They were walking down the street casually when they heard something like a thunderclap. Wakka immediately covered his ears to prevent himself from going deaf, and Tidus flinched.
"What the hell was that?" Wakka said. "Sounded like a fuckin' army of Al Bhed just went nuts with their guns."
Suddenly, cops rushed past them. "Yep. Like a fuckin' army. Let's roll." Tidus ran after them, and Wakka followed. They came to a twenty-story building with a huge hole in the side at tenth-story height. "Hey, officer!" Wakka shouted to the nearest cop. "What the hell happened here?" he asked. "Shots fired." The cop replied. "What the hell?" Tidus said. "Shots fired? Not a explosion?"
"Yessir. A lot of shots." The cop said. "It wasn't a bomb that did that?" Wakka asked, pointing at the huge hole. The patrolman glanced up. "We don't know, Sir guardians, but we heard shots. Lots of 'em. Like a gang war or something." He shrugged. "So far, we've got them tagged for reckless endangerment, illegal discharge of firearms within city limits, disorderly conduct… Hell, we can throw in exceeding noise restrictions…"
Just then, a sharp crack sounded as boards burst out from one of the tenth-floor windows, followed by a gurgling scream as the man whose body had burst them out sailed across the street and plummeted to a hard landing atop a bench, shattering the wooden frame spectacularly.
Shocked into silence, everyone just stared for a moment as broken boards clattered to the neighboring sidewalk.
Then the silence broke as men hurried to check the condition of the fallen figure, and someone called in for an ambulance-no, several ambulances.
The patrolman that had been talking to Tidus and Wakka swallowed and said, "Guess we can add destruction of city property to the list.
Somewhere above, gunfire rattled, and a shrill scream was suddenly cut off short. Calmly, Tidus drew the Brotherhood from its sheath. "I'm going in," he said. "Wait, sir, you can't…" Tidus shifted the Brotherhood to the cop's general direction. "Did I ever tell you I'm Lady Yuna's guardian?" The copped stopped short and stepped back. Tidus returned the Brotherhood to its usual position, slung over his shoulder, and strode towards the building. Wakka followed, grumbling, pulling out his blitzball.
The door was open, the ground-floor hallway empty and dim; Wakka followed Tidus to the stairwell, blitzball gripped firmly in a throwing position. Up above he could hear hoarse shouts and loud thumps. "Sounds like a ninja movie up there. Who the hell do you think's up there, Ti?"
"Probably Al Bhed and Yevonites. From what I guess, they got themselves into a brawl." Tidus took a look up into the darkness, then headed up the stairs, weapon ready.
The middle floors were dark and silent; Wakka took a quick glance down each hallway, blitzball aimed at nothing, and saw nothing but garbage and emptiness. Tidus didn't even bother to look; he was headed where the action was.
On the tenth floor dim light spilled into the hallway from an open door; the thumping had stopped, but someone was screaming steadily, a scream of pain and terror like nothing Wakka had ever heard before. Gun smoke was drifting in the air, and the whole place reeked of it.
"Yevon, you hear that?" Wakka asked, crouching on the top step. "Yeah," Tidus said, standing in the hallway. "They're really starting to creep me out."
The scream ended in a choking gurgle.
"Cover me, I'm going in." Tidus said as he approached the door, his back to the wall. Wakka didn't bother to reply; Tidus didn't give him time to reply, anyway. Almost as soon as he had finished speaking, Tidus was around the door frame, charging into the room with the Brotherhood ready.
Wakka moved cautiously up the corridor, back to the wall, trying to ignore the fact that there were more than a dozen goddamn bullet holes in that wall, and his back was sliding right across them, begging for another few high-velocity rounds from an Al Bhed rifle to come punching out.
He heard Tidus' footsteps go in, then stop somewhere in the middle of the room.
And he didn't hear anything but a thick dripping sound, like steak sauce going on.
"Oh, Yevon," Wakka muttered to himself, very quietly. Something wasn't right. The all-out firefight, the blown-out wall, now that heavy silence, and something intangible and indefinably wrong, in a way the city had never been wrong before.
Just as Tidus had said.
"Ti?" Wakka called quietly.
Tidus didn't answer; Wakka heard his shoe scuff on grit, but Tidus didn't say anything at all.
Wakka stepped forward, blitzball ready, and swung around the doorframe.
Then he stopped, frozen, staring into the room beyond.
It's odd, what goes through a person's head at certain times-or at least Tidus thought so, as he took in what lay in front of him. Because what he immediately thought of, upon seeing it, was his mother.
He remembered her holding him, crooning soothingly to him, when he was maybe four, five years old. He remembered the soft touch of her hands, and how long and thin her fingers seemed, and how one curl of her hair brushed against his forehead as he held him close.
Then the rest of the memory came back, and he decided that maybe it wasn't so very odd after all.
Because the reason she'd been holding him and comforting him is that he had woken up screaming in the darkness, shaking uncontrollably with nameless terror, after some nightmare he couldn't remember, something about monsters in the night, about suffocating in his own blood, about the things that wanted to hurt him.
And she had rocked him gently in her arms and had told him softly, "Those bad things are just dreams, they're not real. They can't hurt you. There are no monsters in the night, not really."
As he looked at the big room on the tenth floor, the room where one wall had been partly shot away, the room littered with broken glass and spattered blood and plaster dust, the room where his unflappable fellow guardian Wakka was standing dumbstruck, Tidus knew that his mother had lied.
Because the monsters had to be real. Nothing else could have done this.
The two guardians stared silently for a long moment.
Finally, Wakka spoke.
"Gang war, my ass," he said.