Disclaimer: No part of Square-Enix is mine.

Like Death Warmed Over

Chapter 5

I discovered quickly that I'd really missed out on a lot while I was off being young and adventurous. It'd never been me to sit around and watch, but age and experience had made me wiser and I was struck by all I didn't know about technology, despite the fact that I'd been using and inventing machina more complex than these for years. I would have thought it laughable had anyone dared to suggest it just days ago, but I really had learned. While I'd been toeing the line of prodigious in my later years, my mother's thought processes were unorthodox to the point that they didn't seem to follow logic. I'd be lying if I said the ease with which she completed complex tasks didn't wound my ego at all, but I chose to take away what I could from the experience rather than drown myself in feelings of inferiority. I knew I looked twelve, and it seemed for all intents and purposes (whatever those were) I was going to stay that way, but the truth of the matter was that I found it difficult to follow her techniques even with my seventeen-year-old mind. It was all very surreal.

It was starting to hit me that I'd never really known my mother. Watching her work was like artistry, and the enthusiasm it brought her was so strikingly like me that it was hard to believe I had failed to understand these things before. I was awed, but at the same time it was a rather rude awakening along the lines of, hey, Rikku, you were an ignoramus back then.

Actually, the learning made me feel more of an ignoramus than I ever could have imagined, but me being me derived quite a lot of enjoyment from the experience. I followed my mother around 24/7, taking great pains to savour and delight in whatever we were doing far more than I probably would have had I not been hoping that my lackadaisical behaviour would piss Bahamut off.

In these days, my sanity became a hot item for discussion as I was more frequently caught berating the omnipresent ass whether I was alone or not. Being already tied to the logically-inexplicable appearance of Auron, the new schizo personality didn't help my reputation and I became acutely aware that I was being talked about at every turn. It was a good thing I couldn't make myself care; I had bigger fish to fry.

The fayth weren't helping, either. I wasn't a fool; propitious as the escapade seemed, I was by no means under the impression that I was here for kicks and giggles. Bahamut controlled me, much as I utterly despised the fact, and my presence was perpetually intertwined with his mission. I doubted very much that it had anything to do with my mother's fate, but I vowed fervently that if he was going to make me his pawn, we were gonna play the game my way. Was I actually going to win- I somehow had a bad feeling about that one, but I sincerely hoped I'd find a way to cheat.

Bottom line – the clock was ticking, and I was wasting time. My mother's life was still hanging in the balance, despite my best efforts to avert the disaster, and I was livid at the complete lack of sympathy, help and direction the ubiquitous idiot (read: Bahamut) deigned to provide.

Remaining optimistic, I continued on with the plan as no better ideas implanted themselves in my mind. It was during the second week that things really started to get interesting. Like most significant events, this one started on a pretty normal day – well, or whatever you wanted to say about it; normal was probably a poor description given the circumstances. It was early morning, and I felt my preteen hormones kicking in with a fervour I found quite disgusting as my mother roused me for another day, much to my sleepy dissatisfaction.

After a few days of motherly disciplinary attitude over the (admittedly questionable) situation, she had rather seemed to warm up to my constant company and our relationship had begun to take on a different colour. Almost friendship-like, I had a feeling she had paradoxically begun to trust me in a new way. My appreciation for our new bond was admittedly lacking, however, as I felt the weight of my mattress shift as she sat down, shaking me awake with anachronistic energy. I responded with some random whiny mumbling and turned my back to her sleepily, but she wasn't having any of that.

"Riiiiiikku," she crooned, and I was sure even in my dormant mind that I did not like that tone. I stiffened, still refusing to open my eyes.

"…What."

She turned over, now kneeling next to me, bouncing. "IIIIII… have something you're gonna like," she said in a singsong voice.

I sighed. "Unless you've found a way to simulate Holy using machina, I don't wanna know for another-" I looked over my shoulder at the chocobo clock next to my bed. "…Three-fifteen?"

A slightly guilty look crossed her features. "Nevermind that, come see, come seeeeee!"

…And you thought I was obnoxious.

I groaned, muttering some undecipherable curses to Bahamut and managed to roll out of bed, rubbing my eyes sleepily before turning them on my mother again. "Alright, alright, I'm up," I whined. "Are ya gonna tell me what's so important now?"

Her eyes shone as she took my hands, the picture of radiant excitement. "Time travel."

I blinked. "Yeaaaaah. Have you been sniffing motor oil or somethin'?"

She wagged a finger at me. "Of course not. I was asleep, and then it just came to me… and we're gonna make it happen, together!"

"It's not possible," I said skeptically, but part of me was intrigued, and the glow in her eyes seemed to contradict my logic.

"Or is it?" she said, and my lips parted as our gazes locked, and in a split second I had dashed across the room, rummaging in my clothes drawer. I grabbed the first thing I found, pulling it on quickly.

"Let's go," I said, reaching for shoes in a rush, and she turned and ran as I quickly yanked my finger out of the back of my sneaker, bouncing awkwardly after her for a few steps before my feet obliged me and settled into the soles. "Wait up, wait up!" I cried, ignoring that my screams were probably waking half of Home and feeling slightly vindictive in that knowledge as roundabout that statistic had made my blacklist the previous week.

She stopped for about half a second with a look more exasperated than any I ever gave my brother and then took off again, shouting, "Hurry up!"

I rolled my eyes and ran faster, lamenting the loss of my seventeen-year-old legs as she was still far ahead of me. We ran further, but as I streaked by the garages in which we'd spent the last few days, I was confused. "Mom, we passed-" I yelled as best I could through my sprint.

"Just follow me!" she said, pushing open a door quickly, and actually pausing to hold it for the few seconds it took me to catch up to her. I followed her hastily down a spiraling set of stairs that, as far as I knew, led to not much but a bunch of control systems. I had no idea why we were here, and I said so.

"There's nothing to work with down here," I cried as we ran down a long corridor lined with doors.

"That's what you think!" she said, voice full of delight. She stopped dead right at the end of the hallway and I nearly slammed straight into her as a result of the lack of warning.

"Mo-om," I whined, slumping over with my hands on my knees to catch my breath. "What… are we doing here?"

She didn't answer, chewing on her lower lip as she ran her palm over the blank wall, her fingertips seeming to search for something. After a few seconds, her hand stopped and she pressed her whole palm against the surface. I stared with wide eyes as a small square glowed blue at her touch, numerical markings appearing where her hand had activated. She tapped out a sequence, and to my amazement, the wall slid aside at its corner, revealing a large chamber. I gaped.

"What is this?" I asked breathlessly.

She smiled deviously. "My lab."

I walked inside. "…Rumo cred."

"Rikku!"

I'd forgotten my age. "Uh, I mean…" I gave up trying to find synonyms for profanity as I gazed around in wonder. "Holy…"

It was brilliant. Higher-tech than anything I'd ever seen, enough curious machina to keep me occupied until I aged naturally back to seventeen, and ingeniously concealed. I noted straight off that the ceiling was almost twice as high as a normal room's; it reached past the floor above. Some quick calculations brought the realization that the rest of Home had to have literally been built around it. I tried to picture where we were in relation to the ground floor and decided the extra height was probably accounted for by the addition of a most likely unnecessary staircase. The lab had been designed to never be discovered. It was orgasmic; the most beautiful trick of engineering and architecture I had ever seen.

"You're drooling, Rikku." Her voice broke through my daydreams.

"Probably," I agreed, refusing to remove my eyes from the lovely sight. "How didn't I know about this?"

"Becaaaaause," she said, drawing out the word, "Nobody knows about this, except me and your dad."

I managed to stop staring at the machina long enough to give her a look of pure confusion. "That doesn't make sense," I argued. "This place was built in collab by us, how could you keep somethin' like this a secret?"

"Wasn't hard. Just drew the blueprints around it."

My eyes roved the large space. "Yevon tysh ed, you're a vil- uh, fricking genius."

She ignored my language and sighed contentedly. "Yep, this is all mine."

"I kinda believe you about that time travel thing after seeing this…"

"Yeah, about that," she said, and walked across the room to something that was probably a desk at some point but currently closer resembled a large trash heap. She yanked a notebook out from under some greasy machina parts and somehow extracted a pen amidst the chaos, biting on the (I couldn't help but think unsanitary) end of it thoughtfully, before beginning to sketch and write. The pen scratched furiously for some time; she eventually gravitated toward a chair and sat down in it, still working. I was more than pleased to give her the time as I was itching to examine several especially intriguing machina in exact detail.

About halfway through an inspection of one curious model whose complex inner workings quite aroused my interest, I heard the drop of a pen nearby and looked up to see my mother beaming at her workbook page. "Done?" I asked, and set the machina down, walking over to her to see what she'd devised.

She nodded, still staring at her work. "It's so simple, I can't believe I never thought of it."

I raised an eyebrow at her, taking the notebook from her hands and studying her notes. There were pages upon pages, but I read through carefully, my eyes growing wider and wider as the calculations and diagrams began to fit together. "Yevon, this is…" I couldn't find words as my eyes pored over the writing.

"Isn't it easy?" she implored incredulously.

I nodded, though I knew I couldn't have worked it out myself. "Amazing! It's practically spelled out in the physics. I can't believe- those Yevonites are idiotic! Imagine where Spira'd be if they'd spent less time praying and more time trying to solve their own problems! Rumo cred," I swore in disbelief, my face a picture of awe.

My mother seemed to be in a science-induced ecstasy, as she didn't bat an eyelash at my mouth. "I think we can do it, Rikku!" she cried.

"What are we waiting for?" I replied eagerly, and she grasped my hands.

"We're going to make history… Yevon, this is gonna change Spira!"

I had no idea how successfully or even if the idea would come to fruition, but as we set to work at the crack of dawn, I could scarcely remember being more excited about anything.

For the next few days, my mother and I ate, slept and breathed our project. It wasn't a time machine, per se; what she had devised was a much simpler concept: a time sphere. We'd had a time finding an appropriate vessel, but on my own suggestion, ironically, we'd decided to try altering a regular lightning-based sphere, like the ones I'd seen in Djose on Yuna's pilgrimage. After all, science dictated that nothing could move faster than the speed of light, so we hoped to manipulate the advantage of having that kind of contained energy to serve our purposes.

It wasn't easy. We'd work for hours on end, forgetting to eat and sleeping, most nights, in the lab. Pops knew what we were doing, but from what I'd heard when I snuck off to the kitchens at odd hours to grab food, there were rumours flying around left and right about me. The nicest claimed I'd run away; the rest involved Auron – I'll leave the details to your imagination. For Yevon's sake, I was twelve – it was disturbing! But I digress; public opinion couldn't have been further down on my list of priorities at the moment anyway.

Another week passed, and my mother and I were making progress. Somehow our minds had seemed to meld together in a singular train of thought, and as we tinkered we had no trouble trading off and trying something a different way, until finally we had a product we considered close to functional. We were so close to success we could almost taste it, and my amazement at the rapidity with which it had come ceased to fade as we drew nearer to our goal. As excited as I was, however, part of me didn't want to finish the time sphere. I associated it, though I never quite thought it all the way through, with the end of my time in the past, with my mother. It was a strange sense, somewhere simultaneously in the pit of my stomach and the back of my mind, that pricked me almost subconsciously every so often. I didn't know how to verbalise the feeling, but it was there, and it made me uneasy.

I also had not completely forgotten, though I did temporarily through my preoccupation more often than was respectable, that Bahamut had not been so ambiguous when he had hinted that my mother's death was imminent. It was heart-wrenching now more than ever, and I resented the fayth for their cruel game, only hoping that I wouldn't have to be there if and when it… happened.

Roughly three weeks after we'd begun, we triumphed. Our prototype was a thing of beauty, we'd checked and rechecked, tweaked and redone our work until both of us worked on the time sphere in our dreams, its mathematics refusing to leave our minds. We were euphoric, but nervous. We knew we would have to test the sphere, but the prospect made us anxious. One small calculation error could spell disaster, and I was adamant that my mother should have nothing to do with the very first experiment. She didn't know that it posed no threat to me, of course, and I comforted myself with that knowledge as we prepared ourselves for the first trial. She was by no means pleased that I should have all the fun of testing dangerous machina, but I literally threw a fit when she tried to argue. Hey, whatever it took. I was not about to enable her death.

We tested it in the afternoon, and we agreed that it was a notoriously bad idea to try to go anywhere uh, exciting, on the test run. My mother spent what seemed like hours reminding me of how everything worked, clearly having forgotten that I'd helped build the thing. I configured the sphere to a mere ten minutes into the past, my mother sighed and watched me somewhat wistfully, and I activated the device.

It was a wrenching sort of feeling, of flying yet simultaneously being rooted to the ground, and I was paralysed the whole time. I was glad I mostly breathed out of habit, because the sphere squished all the air right out of me for a few seconds, and then it was over, and I stood in a secluded corner of the lab precisely, as the small interface on the sphere indicated, ten minutes ago. Making sure I was hidden from view, I peeked from behind a table and saw myself looking rather exasperated as my mother fretted about how this and that should go and what to expect. It wasn't a particularly on-par description, but then, it wasn't as if either of us had ever done it before. I waited a few minutes, not particularly wanting to confront my past self (who knew what kind of rips in the fabric of time and space that could cause), and watched myself disappear with surreal wonder. When I had gone, I stepped out from where I had hidden.

"Well, that worked," I said, feeling shocked as I approached my mother.

"Yes, I knew it would," she said distractedly, her features contorted slightly with an expression of worry as she stared at something across the room.

I frowned. "I thought you'd be more excited."

She waved me off, running over to a control panel on the wall. I heard her swear violently, and I knew something was wrong. "Rikku, take the sphere and get out of here."

"What?" I asked, my stomach sinking with fear.

"The sphere's energy release – probably because we chose to use the lightning sphere – has put the electromagnetic pulse radiation levels in here through the roof," she explained quickly, pressing buttons and tripping the switches like a madwoman. "I'm afraid it's gonna fry every piece of machina in Home – ooh, this is not good. Get the sphere and get out – we can't afford to lose it!"

I hesitated. "Is it safe?" I asked fearfully.

"I don't know. It's not gonna do any good standing there, though, so just do as I say!" she yelled at me, and I knew I didn't have much choice. I didn't know what I could do to fix the problem, and as I looked around I saw some of the machina already beginning to malfunction and spark from the stress of the invisible pulsing energy.

"Mom, I-"

"Rikku, go!" she cried, and I, torn between my self-appointed duty as her protector and the overwhelming feeling of helplessness that had enveloped me as I watched her try to shut the systems down, squeaked involuntarily.

"Only if you come, too!" I replied, but she wasn't having it.

"If I can't shut the C.P. down, we're all done for! Tell your father!"

I screamed in frustration and ran to find Pops. I rushed to the upper levels where I figured he'd be and was surprised, though I didn't greatly appreciate the timing, to find Auron there, talking to him. I had more pressing matters to worry myself over than what was going on between the two of them, however, and wasted no time in saying so. "Pops, Mom needs help, something went wrong!" The words had no sooner left my mouth than he brushed past me, taking off down the hall quickly. I threw the time sphere at Auron. "Take this and get out of here," I said. "I've gotta go help my mom."

He looked at me. "If your mother is in trouble, I'll accompany you," he said, but I shook my head furiously.

"You don't understand! You gotta get that thing as far away from here as possible! Just do it!" He didn't look pleased to take orders from a 12-year-old, but he nodded and I breathed for half a second before running off, back down to the lab.

When I arrived, my dead heart stopped.

Everything was silent, an eerily symbolic mirror of the stillness in which my mother lay. She was on the floor, glassy-eyed, and Pops knelt beside her, his ear to her chest. The significance of the scene struck me all at once; my failure, the reality of her death, finally confronting me, the fayth's game. It was too much. My heart was dead, but my soul felt the break inside. It was my end-all, or it would have been, if Bahamut hadn't intervened.

I choked and screamed, but my cries went unnoticed, echoing in my mind only as the world began to shift and twist and the terrible picture faded from my view as I felt my body go weightless, my brain not comprehending but somehow knowing that this was the fayth's plan all along.

I was floating, flying, but my eyes dripped with tears; I couldn't stop. My misery was overwhelming, unbearable, indescribable. I sobbed shamelessly as Bahamut materialised before me again.

"Do not waste your tears, child."

I glared at him angrily through water-blurred eyes. "You did this! You made me live this, you sick bastard!"

He stared at me stoically. "All humans die, Rikku. Some die young, some die old. But very few die before their time, and your mother is not among those."

I had no response to that, and stood there crying extremely uncomfortably.

"It seems cruel, but you are too distraught at the current moment to understand why it had to be so. I ask that you bear with me a while longer, and yes," he added, that distasteful bored expression on his face, "the request is a courtesy."

Tears streamed down my cheeks. "I hate you so much," I said, but I lacked the energy to fight with him further.

"Sleep now, child, and when you wake, all will be healed."

I had no idea what that meant, but a heaviness settled over me, and I fell into a deep slumber.