Chapter 31: Ripple
After forwarding Tidus's time flow one week, Kaila and Bahamut decided Auron should pay another visit. "We have a big ripple to cope with now because you told Dannae what happened to Jecht. She's still following her pattern of giving up, but it's too soon," Bahamut explained.
"Not knowing ... That would seem worse to me." Auron leaned back against the wall of the building behind him.
Kaila smiled sympathetically at Auron's compassion for the woman he only recently met. "I know. But by not knowing, she kept holding on for Jecht to return. She stayed just long enough for Shuyin to become independent. But now, she has no hope of seeing her husband again, so she's ready to leave, even though Tidus is still a little boy."
"Then, what should I do?"
She sat down on the ground and thought through the events that really happened, trying to foresee what might change for Tidus if he lost his mother too soon. "Keep trying to gain his trust, and try to talk Dannae out of her decision. Her mind is already made up, but we need her to hold on as long as possible. Tidus needs to be at least sixteen to survive on his own without her."
"If you can alter the dream, why can't you just remove my mistake?" Auron asked.
"There's a continuum for Tidus that's hard to explain," Bahamut answered. "If we erase something he's already aware of, he'll notice it. Dannae's mind is already too far gone; she's already neglecting him because of her depression. If we erase what you said to her, so that she gets better all of a sudden, he may get suspicious. Dannae is just an illusion, but Tidus's soul is real. Dannae wouldn't have even been here to speak with you if we hadn't added her memories after a couple of close calls where Tidus almost noticed gaps."
Auron sighed. "This is hard."
Kaila sighed, too, sympathetic again. "I know. But if she dies early, Tidus will be left to fend for himself at age seven. In reality, the temple came to claim Shuyin, but we can't let that happen this time. It's too drastic a difference from the pattern, especially at such a young age. He needs to grow up in his home, but you're the only 'real' person Tidus has. Just don't let him know what happened to his dad yet, and don't let him see his mother's death first-hand. It was too painful for Shu, so he ended up blaming himself. And that contributed to what he is now. We can't forge a guardian from that."
The warrior monk accepted their wisdom. Then, he straightened and crossed the pier to visit Dannae and her son once more. Tidus was on the deck again. But this time, he stood still and quiet, staring at the ocean, looking rather lost. Auron suspected the boy was worried about his mother. "Is she all right?"
"Why should you care?" Tidus returned. Again with the defensiveness ...
"If she dies, I wouldn't know what to do."
Tidus's hands curled into fists as he turned to face him. "Don't say Mom is gonna die!"
Auron realized he had made another mistake. "I apologize."
Upset, Tidus ran inside.
The warrior monk sighed in disgust. "I'm doing this all wrong. I should have taken Yuna to Besaid and let Kimahri handle Jecht Jr." But, resigned to his promise, Auron let himself inside. Dannae wasn't around, so he supposed she was in her bedroom. Entering the hall, he heard the boy crying into his pillow on his bed, so he paused outside the boy's door. "Tidus ..."
The boy immediately rolled toward the wall, back to the door. "What do you want?"
"I want to talk to you."
"Why?" the boy challenged.
"Because this door isn't very interesting." When a long moment of silence followed, Auron entered and sat down on the edge of the bed at the boy's feet, but he said nothing. Sitting in patient silence, uncomfortable with this parenting thing, the warrior monk asked himself what Jecht might do or say if he were here. Then, he shook his head and considered what Braska would do instead. But Auron wasn't either of those men, so he suddenly felt inadequate trying to fill their shoes.
Tidus pushed himself up on his elbows and looked over his shoulder at the man. "What are you doing?" he complained about his silent presence.
"Waiting for you, so we can talk."
The boy sniffled and rubbed an eye to wipe away his tears, but a stray still rolled down his cheek. "Is my mom going to die?"
The warrior monk supposed giving the kid the straightforward truth wasn't the right thing to do. But neither was lying to him. "She's very sad right now. She probably feels like dying, but we don't want her to give up hope yet. So, instead of letting her dwell on what she's lost, we need to help her realize what she still has. … She still has you ... right?"
Tidus pushed himself to sit upright and dangled his legs over the side of the bed. "I guess so." He folded his hands between his skinned knees.
Auron studied the sad little boy and considered his future within the confinement of the dream and the plans of the Fayth for him beyond it.
The boy sniffled and wiped his tears again, but he had nothing further to say to the stranger.
After another long, awkward silence, Auron stood and left the boy's room, careful to pull the door shut to give him some privacy.
Auron checked on Tidus once a week for a couple of weeks after that, until Dannae's rapidly failing health made it necessary for him to check-in every day. Within another week, Auron began sleeping on the sofa to get the boy off to school in the mornings and prevent him from missing meals.
))((
One weekend morning, Tidus woke and dressed in his Sea Stars blitzball uniform before running into the kitchen to make himself some breakfast. He buttered some toast for the mini-oven and grabbed a plum from the fruit basket to eat while he waited for his toast to cook. Sweet, sticky juice from the overripe plum dripped down his fingers, but he wiped them on his clean shirt as he hummed to himself between bites. When the timer dinged, without a second thought, he reached a bare hand into the mini-oven to grab his toast. "Ouch!" He dropped the toast on the floor and jerked his hand back at the intense sting. Sucking air through his teeth to keep from crying, Tidus looked at his burnt fingers. Red welts were already rising into puffy blisters.
Setting down his half-eaten plum, the boy cradled his wounded hand to his chest and entered the living room to look at the warrior monk on one of the long, curved sofas. The man had spent most of his time talking with his mother in private or sitting alone on the deck, staring out to sea. Auron was an utterly confusing and annoying enigma because he never said anything, but when he did, it was weird. He happened to be here at the moment, though. So, Tidus approached and poked him on the shoulder. "Auron?"
The warrior monk muttered a muffled, reluctant response without moving.
Tidus used a sticky finger to pry open Auron's one good eye. "Hey, are you awake?"
The man frowned at the boy and pushed his hand away. "I am now." He shifted on the sofa to face him. "What are you doing up so early? It's not a school day. Grown-ups like to do this thing called 'sleeping in' on the weekends."
"I burnt my fingers." Tidus showed him the injured digits.
"Run them under cold water."
"I need a bandage."
Auron grasped the boy's wrist and narrowed his good eye on the red marks. "You don't need a bandage. Run them under cold water," he repeated after seeing the minor injury. Then, he rolled over, pulled his red haori further up to his neck like a blanket, and tried to go back to sleep.
"But they hurt really bad like they're on fire."
The warrior monk could tell he would have no peace until he did something about it. Sighing to himself and shrugging off the haori, Auron padded sleepily into the kitchen, and Tidus trailed behind him. "A bandage isn't going to make it feel any better. You need to put something cold on it."
"You mean like when I sunburn, and my mom puts an ice rag on my back?"
Auron cast the boy a doubtful side-glance at the strange remedy, but then plunged the burnt fingers under a cold, running stream at the sink. With a groan, he bent to pick up the toast that had landed butter-side-down on the floor. "Do you have a game today?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know." Auron tossed the toast in the trash and passed a wet cloth to the boy to clean up his own mess. Turning off the water, he grabbed a towel to dry his hands. "Why do you have your uniform on if you don't know?"
"Because I like it. I like playing blitzball. My dad used to say I'm not very good at it, but I think I am. I'm just not as good as him yet because he's bigger. But someday, when I get as big as my dad, I'll do those shots better than he did!" he fussed at the sleepy warrior monk. "I'm going to learn the sphere shot and the Jecht shot, and—that's my dad's own shot, you know. Do you play blitzball? You don't look like you'd be any fun to play blitzball with." Tidus bent to wipe up the butter. "I guess it doesn't matter since you're not one of the Abes. I know all the Abes because my dad used to take me to his games until I started playing my own. Then they put our games on the same days, and he had to go to his own games because he'd get fired if he didn't. But they said they were going to fire him anyway because he was drinking really bad. He promised he would quit, but he never quit. So, I don't care if he's gone." His brows dipped with his frown. "I hate him. And you can tell him that, too! He was always drinking and being mean to mom and me, but she likes him anyway. How can she like him when he was so mean to her? He was only nice when he was fishing. And even then, he sometimes yelled at me for being too noisy and scaring the fish away. Do you like fishing?" He paused and looked up at Auron.
Auron blinked at the boy's early morning chatter as if he'd been listening to squirrel fuss at him for getting too close to his acorn. "What did you drink with that toast? Ten cups of coffee?"
"Huh?" Tidus was confused.
Auron shook his head. "If I could bottle it and sell it, I'd make a million gil."
"Bottle what? You mean my dad's beer?"
"Never mind, kid."
The boy pinched the wet rag between two fingers and left it unrinsed and bunched on the countertop. "Can I have a bandage now? My fingers hurt."
Auron rubbed a palm over his sleepy face but surrendered to the boy's persistence. "Fine. Where does your mom keep the bandages?"
"In the bathroom up high, where I can't reach the medicines. But if I climb on the sink, I can reach them. But don't tell her that. I can climb the walls in the hallway, too. I put one foot and hand on one wall and one foot and hand on the other, and I can walk right up to the ceiling like a spider! But don't tell her that either."
The warrior monk grumbled something about squashing spiders who wake up too early on weekends and left to get the first aid kit.
Tidus shrugged, picked up his plum again, and tried to suck more juice from it. While he studied his burns, his mother came into the kitchen. She had been acting strangely and sleeping a lot lately. It was a little scary to see her vacant expression. "Mom, are you coming to my game today?" When she didn't respond, he was disappointed but approached to show her his fingers. "I burnt myself making toast. It really hurts."
"Yes. It hurts." She shook her head and started to cry. "Baby, I'm so sorry." Dannae wrapped her arms around him to hold him close. "I can't do this anymore."
"Do … what?"
"But you'll do fine. I just know it. He'll help you."
The boy was confused at her increasingly disjointed conversations, but he figured she was talking about Auron. "Oh yeah, he's loads of help." Tidus rolled his eyes. "He didn't even want to give me a bandage." Discouraged and impatient, the boy pulled away from his mother and left the kitchen to meet the warrior monk in the living room as he was coming back with the first-aid kit.
Auron opened the kit, removed a bandage, and dropped the rest of the box on the sofa. Pulling off the sterile tabs, he placed the bandage on the back of the boy's hand. "There. A bandage. Happy?"
"That's not where my burn is."
"I'm not putting a bandage on burn blisters. Just keep them dry and clean, and—" The sound of glass shattering in the kitchen interrupted him. Auron froze.
The boy scrunched up his face and moved past him to see what his mother dropped.
"Tidus!" Auron grabbed his arm. He seemed ready to tackle him if necessary to prevent him from taking another step toward the kitchen. "I'll help your mother." Digging into his pocket, the man deposited several gil into the boy's superfluously bandaged hand. Then, he took him by the arm again and walked him to the front door. "Go to the shop down the street and buy a bottle of healing potion for your fingers. You can use what's left to buy yourself a treat."
Tidus started to question the orders, but the strength of the warrior monk's presence made him think twice about it this time. Mildly intimidated, the boy picked up his shoes. He slipped them on without untying them and cast one more glance at Auron's strange change of mood, but then he left.
))((
Auron sighed with relief as soon as Tidus was gone. Then, he hurried into the kitchen. He knew what to expect, thanks to conversations with Kaila. Dannae was on the floor, a pool of crimson spreading around her next to the shard of broken glass she had used to end her life. But he knelt beside her and lifted her shoulders to lean against him.
"Tidus?" she whispered.
"Auron," he corrected.
The woman squeezed her eyes shut against her tears. "I loved them both so much."
"I know you did. We'll try hard to resolve this mess, so you can be with both of them again someday."
Bahamut and Kaila materialized nearby.
"End her suffering. Call a summoner to send her, so that she doesn't linger," Auron requested, though he himself was unsent.
"Her soul is already in the Farplane. And this Zanarkand doesn't have summoners," Bahamut answered. "There's no need since everyone, except Tidus, is an illusion." They all watched as Dannae's body dispersed into pyreflies, and the evidence of her suicide disappeared as if it never happened.
Kaila seemed shaken by her own memories of this experience. "This is going to cause a major ripple between Shuyin's lifeline and Tidus's. But this way, Tidus won't be haunted by guilt over it the way Shuyin was."
Auron was at a loss. "How do I tell him?"
"Don't worry about finding the right words. Just be there for him."
Later, when Tidus returned home, he kicked off his shoes and ran to the sofa, where Auron sat. "I got the healing potion!" The boy deposited a bag in Auron's lap. "And I got some gum." He grinned to show off the blue wad between his teeth that had dyed his teeth, tongue, and lips blue. "And I got this really awesome manga! See? It's got—"
"Tidus," Auron interrupted. "We need to talk." Unsure of how to deliver the news, he opened the bag and removed the bottle of healing potion. It was obviously the most expensive bottle the boy could find since he had only enough gil left for the gum and book. The boy was still young enough that he had no common sense on how to spend money wisely yet. But that had not been the point of this shopping trip. "Your mother just passed away. She's already been taken to the temple for burial at sea." He cringed at the lie, but it was the only thing he could think of to ward off questions about seeing her. "I'm sorry."
The boy's brows rose at the unexpected news, and he shook his head in disbelief. Then, he pitched his manga to the floor and ran down into the lower bedroom. When he saw that his mother wasn't there, he ran back up to the kitchen. She wasn't there either. Returning to the living room, Tidus struggled between denial and realization that it was true. "She's really gone?"
Auron answered the boy's pain-filled question with a small nod.
"But I bought her some healing potion to make her all better, and I ran back as fast as I could."
Surprised to learn the flaw in his thinking, Auron looked again at the expensive bottle. "You … spent all that money on a potion for her?"
Tidus's heart constricted as fear, sorrow, anger, and shock began to overwhelm him all at once. Sitting down on the floor and drawing his head to his knees, the boy started to cry.
Uncapping the healing potion, Auron knelt before the boy and applied some of it to the burns on his small fingers. The magical tonic instantly healed them. "This was a very thoughtful gift. But it couldn't have helped, no matter how fast you ran. Your mother's pain was too deep for any potion."
The boy wiped angrily at the flow of tears burning in his eyes. "But I didn't even get to say goodbye."
Auron capped the bottle. "Her last words were that she loved you and your father very much." The warrior monk felt unsure about what to do next. He had purposefully kept his distance from the boy to avoid questions about his father. But as the boy's mother deteriorated, he had come to know him well enough to truly empathize with him. Shifting to the floor to sit beside him, Auron rested a hand on Tidus's scruffy blond head.
Kaila, who had been at the back of the room with Bahamut, came forward and knelt behind the boy to give him a gentle hug, though he couldn't see her or feel her touch.
The boy unfolded and crawled into Auron's lap to continue grieving in his arms. Auron accepted him and let him cry until he exhausted himself. Then, he carried the boy to his bed.
"Auron, where do people go when they die?" Tidus quietly asked as he released the man's neck.
The question caught the unsent man off-guard. There was no quick and easy answer, but perhaps an answer wasn't what the boy wanted right now. "They go where their hearts lead them."
"Then … she must have gone to my dad," the boy figured with a hint of resentment in his voice. "Do you think they can see me where they are?"
"I think that they wish they could." The warrior monk straightened and started to leave.
"Auron? Will you come to my game today if I have one ... since my mom won't be there?"
"You don't have to go to a game today, kid. I'm sure your coach and team will understand why you didn't show."
The boy seemed relieved to hear that, even if he did already have his uniform on. "Will you come to my next game?"
Auron remembered Jecht lamenting that he had not seen very many of his son's games. "I'll be there."
With nothing more to say, the boy rolled onto his side, facing the wall to be alone with his grief.
Auron pulled his door shut and turned around as Bahamut and Kaila appeared.
"He handled that amazingly well this time. Thank you, Auron." Kaila gave him a hug.
))((
Tidus reluctantly came to accept Auron as his temporary guardian. At the very least, he no longer complained about him being an unwelcome guest in his home. Auron was slower to adapt to the pseudo-parent situation he suddenly found himself in, but he gradually got the hang of the boy's daily routines and helped him stick to them as life returned to a new normal. The boy's routine care was easy, even if he was not. His days centered around a full day of school and blitzball practice, and then he usually played by himself outside until dark. Getting him to eat his dinner was easy, too. Getting him to do his homework was hard.
The Fayth found themselves pleasantly surprised at the boy's resilience. Without Jecht around to frustrate and mock him, and without Dannae's gloom to drag him down, Tidus's energy and optimism began to shine … to the point where Auron sometimes wondered if he didn't prefer the quiet, angry child who had nothing to say … like the time Tidus pushed open the front door and peered inside to make sure the living room was empty before trotting a big, wet, reddish-brown dog through the houseboat. Auron didn't suspect a thing until the loud thudding and jumping from the boy's bedroom began to grate his nerves while he was trying to read. Then, after a loud crash that sounded like something broke, he decided enough was enough.
Putting down his book, the warrior monk headed to the boy's bedroom and banged a fist on the door. "Quiet down in there or any furniture you break comes out of your allowance!"
The room got very quiet very quickly, except for one distinct woof!
"No, he didn't." Auron grasped the doorknob and found the boy sitting on his bed in front of a blanket heap that owned a wagging tail. Tidus was still wearing his school clothes, but he was soaked from head to toe as if he'd just come from a blitzball game. His face was streaked with dirt, and he had a new scrape on his forehead. The boy was always banging himself up in one way or another.
"Can I have a dog?" Tidus asked.
Auron frowned. "No."
"Why not?"
"Because you are enough to have to clean up after. Take it back outside."
"Take what back outside?"
"The dog."
"I don't have a dog. That's why I'm asking for one." The boy was dead serious. "Can I please have a dog? I'll take care of it. I promise."
Auron pushed the door open against the keyboard that now lay broken on the floor under a blitzball—obviously what he heard fall.
Tidus read the look on his face. "I never used it much anyway."
Stepping over the keyboard, the warrior monk walked to the bed and jerked the covers from the bundle behind the boy.
The dog responded with another excited woof! And there was mud all over the sheets underneath them.
"Get it out of the house, Tidus."
"Awww, man ..." The boy stood and took his time dragging the big dog off of the bed. The dog resisted, thinking it was a game. "I thought of a really cool name for him, too. I could call him Blitzer. He likes to play blitzball, and he can swim really good."
Auron began stripping the bedding as soon as they were off. "Well, that explains the wet dog smell."
"Our neighbor, Old Man Rane, has a goldfish pond at the end of the pier, and Blitzer wanted to play with the fish. He jumped in, and I didn't know he could swim, so I jumped in to pull him back out."
Auron's brow twitched. That explained the mud, too. "Old Man Rane won't be happy to hear that."
"He wasn't. He chased us away and called us bad words because Blitzer caught one of his fish. But Blitzer didn't know it was a pet. Can we have it for dinner?"
"Have what?" Auron asked, dreading the answer.
Tidus reached into his drawer and pulled out a large, very dead, red-and-white koi.
Auron smacked his own forehead. His hand then slid down his face over his mouth in an effort to keep himself from using the same foul words he suspected Old Man Rane used. "Get the dog out of the house!"
Tidus's lips pursed in a pout, and he plunked the dead fish on his mattress. "My mom would have let me keep him." But, the boy obediently took the dog to the front door to let him out.
"And take a bath!" Auron called after him.
"It's not my bath time yet!" Tidus protested from the living room before coming back to his bedroom door.
"It is now. You smell like wet dog and dead fish."
"What if I don't want to take a bath?" Tidus defiantly puffed out his chest and crossed his arms.
Auron met the challenge with a flat expression. "I really don't care what you want."
"If I had a dog to play with, I'd be willing to take my baths. I'd even be willing to do my homework." The boy grinned with hope.
"Or I could dunk you in the ocean, and you can play with sharks, instead." Auron gathered the muddy sheets into his arms.
The boy's eyes widened, but then he ran to the bath and turned on the tap water.
"A dog," Auron grumbled, shaking his head. Grabbing the dead koi, he took the dirty sheets to the washer. "Spent my entire life training to fight fiends, and now I'm washing sheets because of a smelly, wet dog." After slapping the dead fish on the kitchen counter, the warrior monk turned on the washer's water, added soap, and dumped the sheets into it. Then he returned to the dead fish and glared at it as if it were to blame for enticing the boy into mischief. "Can't you guys speed things up a little more?" he fussed at the unseen Fayth that he knew were hanging around somewhere.
Bahamut appeared, amused.
Kaila laughed aloud. "Aw, but he was a cute dog."
Irritated, Auron picked up the fish and waggled it in her face. "He stole the neighbor's koi!"
She snickered behind a hand. "Then, maybe you should keep a closer eye on him to keep him out of trouble."
"His middle name is Trouble. He's just like his father, only shorter and louder. What, exactly, is our progress rate here? Do I really have to go through ten more years of this?"
Bahamut giggled at the warrior monk's ire. "Well, Tidus went way off Shuyin's original pattern after his mother died, but he's almost back to it now. If left on his own, he will become Shuyin all over again, and he could cause more harm than good. So, please, we need you to stay with him. Once he falls back into the original pattern, we'll speed things up again," Bahamut promised. "We don't have ten more years to get him ready for what's in store, but we have to minimize the gaps enough that it feels like ten years to him."
"It already feels like ten years to me."
"Hey, you're the one who promised Jecht you'd stay with him," Kaila reminded him. "Be grateful this is just a dream, or you'd be in for a long, long ride." She grinned. "You're doing a great job with him, though. And—" She and Bahamut suddenly disappeared.
Freshly scrubbed, Tidus walked in with a big, bulky towel wrapped around his scrawny frame. It was so big in comparison to him that he had to grip it with both fists to keep it around his pot-belly stomach and off the ground to avoid tripping over it. "My pajamas were in my sheets," he unhappily announced to the warrior monk who had too-promptly stripped his bed and dumped the linens in the wash.
The warrior monk ushered the boy out of the kitchen back to the bathroom to get the first aid kit … again. "They'll be dry before you go to bed. Just grab some clean shorts and a T-shirt for now."
"Can I have a bandage for my cut?" He touched his forehead with one finger near the newest scrape to grace his body.
"You don't need a bandage. We still have that healing potion you bought."
"But then no one asks you what happened. When you wear bandages, people ask what happened, and you get to tell them neat stories. My mom used to tell me stories. Do you like telling stories?" Tidus climbed up on the toilet lid and leaned forward to scrutinize Auron's face. "Can you tell me what happened to make this?" He drew a small finger down the side of his own face, mirroring the warrior monk's scar.
Auron considered the boy's innocent question, but he couldn't tell him that someday soon, he would have to try to destroy the same unsent spirit that gave him that scar. He couldn't picture the small, tender-hearted boy facing off against Lady Yunalesca by any stretch of the imagination. "Another story for another time. What happened to make that?" Auron put the healing potion back and grabbed a small bandage, sticking it on the boy's forehead.
"I was jumping off the swings at school and tried a flip, but I fell."
Auron rolled his eyes as if he should have known better than to ask. The boy was a fearless bundle of raw energy. And while that would probably aid him in fighting fiends, a healthy fear was necessary to prevent careless disasters ... like dead koi. "Tidus, tomorrow we have to apologize to your neighbor and offer to replace his fish. You can't go swimming in other people's ponds. Not for any reason. It's inconsiderate and dangerous. And no more jumping off of swings."
Tidus interpreted the warrior monk's weary tone as concern for his welfare, rather than a scolding. "But nothing too bad happened. It's just a little cut, see?" He lifted his bangs and pointed to his forehead bandage. "It might scar, but you have a scar, too. Don't worry, Auron. Everything's going to be okay. You can't control everything that happens to you, but no matter what happens, you can turn it into something good." His small hand patted the scar on his guardian's cheek. Then, with a confident smile, the boy jumped down from the toilet lid and ran to his bedroom to get dressed for bed.
Auron looked to where Kaila and Bahamut stood waiting for him to finish tending the boy. "'Everything's going to be okay,' he says."
Kaila smiled, pleased. "He's learning from you. He'll make a great guardian for Lady Yuna."
"I don't know. This just doesn't feel right sometimes. We're training a little boy to—"
"To do what must be done," Bahamut reminded him. "This is why he was created."
"I know, but … what about Tidus? Have you ever asked what he thinks his purpose is?" Auron countered. "What will happen to him when all is said and done?"
"If he succeeds, he will end our dreaming. We can all rest, even you. If he fails ... he will become the next Sin. I know it's easy to feel for him because you have to take care of him. But, always remember he could become the next destroyer of Spira if he fails to break the cycle."
"The ripples we create for him here in the dream need to make him strong enough to break the pattern out there, so he can defeat Yu Yevon," Kaila added.
Auron nodded, supposing they were right. But then they both quickly disappeared again.
"Who are you talking to?" Tidus had changed into a loose cotton T-shirt and shorts.
The warrior monk turned out the light in the bathroom as he exited. "Just … thinking aloud."
"Will you read me a story?"
"Did you do your homework?"
"I ... Um ..." The boy averted his eyes back toward his bedroom door.
"Do your homework. Then we'll read."
Tidus's shoulders slumped, and he heaved a dramatic sigh as if ordered to do hard time in prison. "Homework is so boring."
With a mixture of amusement, resignation, and remorse, Auron watched the boy's sad, pathetic return to his room. "Your life will be anything but boring soon enough, kid."