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040. Wake

"Hello."

Unfamiliar eyes stared at her, empty, and Rikku realised that she might just have made a terrible mistake.

You see, it'd been almost three years to the day since Sin had disappeared off back to hell and in all that time, he'd never come back. Tidus had come back already, so why didn't he? Rikku wanted to scream about how unfair it was to the world, but she couldn't do that. She knew it wouldn't work; she'd tried already. She'd been to Bevelle and screamed at the monks, gone back to Zanarkand and shouted at the ends of Spira. Cried out into the ocean and yelled at the sky. Nothing had worked. No fayth, no sign of anything. So, she gave up after all while. Well, she did have a daughter to look after. And so she made a new life for herself - or tried. She lived in Bevelle, strange as it was, helping to revitalise the old temple's Machina and rebuild all kinds of parts of the world. Her dad and Brother were in Bikanel, restoring Home, and Yunie, Wakka, Lulu, Kimhari and now Tidus all stayed back in Besaid, finally living the quiet life they'd all hoped occasionally flicking. Well, apart from Tidus. He'd visited a lot in the time he'd been back.

"So, it's still only me back?" He'd asked one of the times he'd visited, watching a very excitable Hazel run around the flat the mother and daughter shared. Rikku shrugged, not making eye contact. She could feel Tidus staring at her. "Rikku..."

"Yeah, I know. I need to move on." She turned to look at him, frowning and anger coating her swirled eyes. "Thing is, I have moved on. I have a different life now, but no one can ever leave him alone. Of course I'd want him back, I'd be crazy not to. Just don't treat me like I'm a stupid teenager, because I'm not!"

Tidus watched her, all scrutinizing, concerned eyes. "I mean, you've barely graduated from being a teenager."

Rikku rolled her eyes but couldn't bite back the chuckle. "Says you!"

"Hey!" He dived out of the way of her incoming attack, laughing back.

"You know, no one used to bat an eye at having children early." She commented, looking back over at her one-year-old daughter. "We all lived short lives - the sooner you had kids, the better, really. But now that sin's dead, it's like overnight people feel entitled to judge me. Took me nine months to grow that baby, you know, it didn't happen in a day!"

Tidus looked at Rikku oddly again, in that way he did whenever he wore I sign saying 'I'm not from here!'

"Well, I don't."

Rikku looked at him flatly. "Well, that makes everything okay." She smirked, and the two chatted on as the day wore on.

But whenever Tidus, or whoever it was visiting then, was gone, and Hazel was in the care of the nurses, Rikku would be alone, confined to her work in the temples. It gave Rikku time to think. Too much time, she thought.

She was tinkering with the machines near the Via Purifico one day, thinking about when they'd come here in the past. And then, inevitably about him. It was always him, in the end. She didn't know whether she'd fallen in love with Auron because of all the heavy, intense emotions then, or because he made her feel safe and comfortable like no one else ever had, or because he actually listened to her. But she had fallen in love, and he seemed to care for her, too. Well, she thought. She paused, screwdriver in hand, and looked up. That was the one thing she'd never been able to find the answer to, all these years. She frowned and got back to her work. It made her feel like an idiot. Even after all that time, he'd never really said how he felt. She never knew how he was really feeling, through it all.

She sighed and muttered the words that were always in her mind out loud.

"Auron... just come back, okay?" She squeezed her eyes shut and then opened them again, looking back down at the strange mechanism in her hand. It controlled a platform, up and down - like a detached elevator.

The pyreflies gathered quite furiously all at once, rising up from the pit over the Via Purifico. Rikku stood, dropping the Machina and equipping her weapon, turning to face it ever so slowly. It wasn't uncommon to see leftover fiends, here and there. Yunie, or any other summoner, hadn't quite made it around here yet.

But Rikku got the shock of her life time when she turned and saw not a fiend drooling at her, but a man. A man she only recognised looking like that from Spheres. But she knew him; she knew him very well. Black hair, warm brown eyes, and that big, red coat.

"Hello." His voice wasn't quite so gruff or terse as it used to be.

Rikku couldn't say anything. She just stared, open-mouthed. She pulled out the handheld contacting device from her pocket and jammed the number 1 button repeatedly. Tidus and Wakka were in town today; they'd get the message and hopefully be over before long. But until then, she had to remember somehow what her tongue was and how to use it.

"I... I have my memories from after my first death, but..." the man's face contorted, and he clutched his head, eyes clamped shut and teeth pressed together. "... they are still assimilating. The fayth... The fayth deemed that it should be I who goes back, not my older self - that man was finished with this world."

Rikku raised her eyebrows and snorted, rolling her eyes in a massive loop. Yeah, sure.

She heard Tidus and Wakka bellowing her name at one end of the temple, and she shouted at them. "I'm here!"

She heard their rumbling footsteps grow louder and louder as she watched this Auron adjusted. He was crouching down now, head still in his hands.

"Rikku, Rikku what's-" Wakka began, but he saw the man before him so that didn't even need to finish that sentence. "Oh."

"Oh my Spira." Tidus drawled, watching Auron, who was still writhing on the floor slightly.

"I'm not certain he's not a fiend." Rikku looked at him through narrowed eyes.

Auron stopped, panting and looked up at them all. "Tidus. Wakka." He turned and looked Rikku in the eye, pupils dilating. "Rikku..."

"No, I don't think he's a fiend." Tidus declared, helping the man up. He and Wakka were about the same age now, Rikku realised with a note of oddity.

"So, we both came back," Auron commented, looking at Tidus with a note of confusion. "Did the Fayth tell you it was your reward, too?"

Tidus nodded. "Yeah. My old man, too. He turned it down." Tidus' jaw seemed to constrict slightly and Rikku saw it. Everyone knew it was a touchy subject; no one went there.

"Hm. I see." Auron turned to face Wakka.

"It is good to see you again." He nodded at Wakka.

"Nice to see you too, but strange to see you looking so you." Wakka declared, looking suspiciously at the man. Rikku didn't blame him.

And finally, he turned to Rikku, still standing behind him with a hand on her hip.

"Rikku." It was more a statement than anything else. Emotions so finely controlled, like the stranglehold a hero has over a snake's slim body. Calm, collected, but ruthlessly efficient.

Rikku looked at him, not moving. In fact, nothing moved. She felt each breath she took throughout her body, heard every cracking of the old plaster in this building. "Yes."

She sighed, shifting, and at once the silence crumbled into a thousand tiny pieces around them. "I think you two can go." She nodded, "even if he turns out to be a strange kind of fiend, I've got him covered." She grinned, waving the men out.

"You need to go and pick up Hazel soon. It's already three, yeah?" Wakka called after himself. Already three? Well, this would have to be quick.

"Hazel...?" He looked back at Wakka, frowning, and looked back at her from the corner of his eyes.

Rikku nodded, taking off her glove. "Yeah, she's an uh..."

"I know who she is." Auron declared, walking closer to her. "It's just, I didn't know her name."

Rikku looked at him wide-eyed. "You know who she is?"

"Of course. Just because I had moved to the next plain doesn't mean that this one stopped existing for me."

Rikku decided not reply, merely to frown and chew her lip in thought. She didn't have time for such philosophical debates right now.

Auron looked at her face, examining it carefully, as though he hadn't seen her for a thousand years.

"It felt like a thousand years." Rikku rolled her eyes. Back with the mind reading. "I suppose we don't have to be so secretive anymore."

Rikku tilted her head to the side. "Gee, you think?"

"I'm... sorry."

He held her head in his hands. "It's fine." She shut her eyes, enjoying the feeling of his hands on her again. "Honestly, I was so angry at you at first. For everything that happened, and I was so mad you just left and didn't tell me anything until you told everyone else. You never told me you cared, never did anything. But then, slowly, I got it. You- the old you-" she looked him up and down again, this was going to take some getting used to, "didn't belong in the Spira we'd made. I'd just held out hope for so long that maybe, somehow, someday, you'd come back."

Auron was silent for a while. "Rikku." Rikku, who'd been looking over at some Machina in the background, tapping one leg behind the other and arms crossed behind her back, looked back up at him with a soft hum. "I do care about you. I always did."

Rikku smiled, but only a lazy one side of her mouth. It felt kind of empty, now that she heard it. It wasn't the firework-setting-off, enthusing moment she'd been hoping for. "I loved you. I still do."

Her eyes flashed open and she finally, truest met his gaze. Her stomach did flips. Now, that was the moment she'd been hoping for all that time.

"I... you..."

"Yes."

"You... no kidding around?"

"No kidding around." It felt strange to watch him smile, to hear him laugh, and to know it didn't have a bite of bitterness behind it. She smiled, properly this time.

"Come on, let's go. We need to get you into different clothes, and then we'll go and get Hazel."

He frowned. "What's wrong with my clothes?"

She laughed with a cackle. "That coat! It was nice on Mount Gagazet, but it's Bevelle, it's summer, and you were famous for it. And I'm not going to use it as a blanket any time soon, either."

He grunted, same as he always did. Seeing his younger self like this proved Rikku's theory: he wasn't moody, arrogant or particularly brusk; he was kind of shy, terrible at emoting, and had been hurt so much by the world he had become a husk of his former self. He asked her general questions as they journeyed back to her house together, but she couldn't really stop looking at him. He looked... so different. And he was smiling, beyond sarcasm or at someone's expense, or a rare fluttering smile when the two were secluded somewhere together.

"Rikku," he said when they'd dressed him in slightly more normal clothes, and she'd shown him around her flat, "can I stay here?"

She looked at him, deadpanned. "No." She grinned at his momentarily floored expression. "Sure. I'm not going to send you off, not now. And I sure as hell wouldn't be about to introduce Hazel to you if I was going to send you off straight away."

He nodded and turned slightly away from her. She watched him; he looked a little more like her memories than the man in the spheres, she was realising. There was the hint of a scar over his right eyebrow and eyelid; his hair was shorter, and maybe slightly more tanned than the spheres would suggest. He was tall - taller than Tidus, and lithe, with power hidden in muscles smaller than the Auron she knew.

"Should we go?" She nodded.

"Sure."

She could tell how excited he was; not from the slight energy in his whirring muscles she felt as she slid her arm through his, but from how he breathed heavily, and how his eyes kept on darting around the buildings until they settled on the nursery. Excitement, or perhaps it was nervousness. She didn't know which, but suspected a mixture of the two instead. They stood before the door together, him slightly behind her on the three narrow, uneven and twisting steps up to the building. She looked back at him and gave him a wink. He looked away quickly.

The door opened. "Ah, Miss Rikku." It was one of the less pleasant nurses, who very obviously didn't like the fact she wasn't married, and so young. How could she tell? Maybe it was the disdainful looks; maybe it was the fact that she emphasised 'Miss' so much - who could tell(!)

"Thank you." Rikku smiled forcefully and beckoned Auron in behind her. "Come on, follow me."

"Ah, another visitor?"

"You could say that." Rikku agreed, vaguely.

"Little Hazel's just waiting for you - I'll go and get her." The nurse declared, and Rikku nodded politely, waiting for the nurse to leave the hallway before she turned to Auron.

"Leave this to me, Hazel's shy, so I'm going to need to do all the talking."

He nodded sharply. "Understood." How strange, to see him being the one taking, not giving orders. She still couldn't quite tell how much of his younger self he was, and how much else had seeped through.

The door opened, and the nurse held the door for the little girl to bolt through to her mother's legs.

"Mommy!" She cried, and latched onto one of her mother's legs, hugging it tightly. Rikku laughed, bending down to rest a hand on the girl's head, greeting her, too. She thanked the nurse as she untangled the little girl from her leg, and crouched down to meet the two-year-old's level.

"How was your day?" She asked, making small talk with the girl until she noticed the man standing next to her mother, eyes going wide as he looked equally as confused at him.

She seemed to crouch into herself, hiding in as much of Rikku as she could. "Who... who's that? Where's Uncle Tidus? And Wakka?" She asked in a voice barely above a whisper.

Rikku looked up at Auron and raised an eyebrow.

He looked between the two and seemed to get Rikku's message. Mind games, she swore. He crouched down to meet their level, tilting his head to he met Hazel's eyes. They didn't have the swirled pupil like her mother, but were a mix of his warm brown and her bright green, making for the most striking and beautiful hazel eyes. "Hello, Hazel. I'm Auron." He held out a hand, hoping that she'd take it. Hesitantly, with a tiny, shy hand she took it and gave one of the weakest, most timid handshakes he'd ever felt. But he adored it.

"Now then Hazel, I need you to be a good girl for mommy and be nice to Mr Auron. Can you do that?"

Hazel looked up at her mother and nodded her head. "And then when we get home, we can have a chat and then you can sleep, and we can fix up some Machina this evening. How does that sound to you?"

Hazel grinned, the frowning expression of shyness melting away into a joyous nod.

Rikku stood, taking Hazel's hand, and they left the nursery together as a family for the first time - not that she knew it, anyway.

When they got home, Rikku sat Hazel down on the sofa and sat on the stool in front of her, Auron joining her on the one next to it.

"Mommy, why do you want to talk? What have I done wrong?" She outed, upset painted all over her face.

Rikku smiled softly. "You haven't done anything wrong! I just need to talk to you, that's all." She put a comforting hand on her daughter's knee. "But I'm going to need you to listen, okay?"

Hazel nodded, curling up into a ball, rucking up the orange shorts she worse that were so old Rikku, Auron thought. He hadn't really been able to take his eyes off the girl; off her eyes, or the brown hair that stretched down to almost her waist, or the cute chubby cheeks she had that Auron only very vaguely remembered having.

"Hazel, do you remember how I said that Daddy went away, before you were born, because the Fayth called him somewhere else?" Hazel nodded, her eyes occasionally flicking from her mother to this new, strange man. "But I said that Daddy might come home one day, didn't I?" Hazel nodded. "Well, Hazel, this is your daddy."

She looked over at Auron. He didn't know what to say, and so he just watched her. He'd never dealt with children this young before; they'd all been five or over when they joined his part of the monastery, and no one knew where they were before that. So he did the only thing he could do. "I'm sorry, Hazel, that I couldn't be here before."

She blinked at him, actually paying him real attention this time. "You mean, this is my Daddy?"

Rikku nodded. "Yep! This is really him. He's been wanting to meet you for a very long time."

She scrunched up her face. "But why did you go?" A little anger touched her small eyes, and Auron's heart lurched.

"I didn't want to go, and I tried my best to stay so that I could see you, but I couldn't do anything when I was called away."

Her face scratched again. "But why are you back?"

"The fayth gave me back because I wanted to see you and R-your mother so badly."

Hazel looked to Rikku for support. "Mommy, I don't get what the man's talking about."

Rikku smiled, with a little hint of sadness. "It's okay honey, I don't get it either."

"Then why is he here?"

"Because he's your daddy, and he's come back after a long time of being away. He's missed us, and he's missed you since before you were here with me. All that matters now is that he's here, and back with us."

Hazel looked at her mother, and over to Auron, and then back to her mother. She frowned after a pause. "Are you going away again?"

"No. Never."

"Good. Because you made Mommy sad."

That was kind of a long one - but I hope you liked it nonetheless! And yes, this does broadly ignore X-2 although I do prefer to take X-2 as inspiration for themes and character development but mostly ignore the actual events.

Please review if you've got time and follow for more. Thanks!