A/N: A HUGE thank you to those of you that have reviewed! I wasn't sure when I began posting this whether or not there was still a following for the Final Fantasy X fandom, and I'm happy to see that one does exist. :) If any of you would be interested, I'm participating in a nifty little fic-gifting event this year over on LiveJournal that requires me to fulfill 12 fic requests by prompters. Final Fantasy X/X-2 is on the list of fandoms I'll be writing for, so if you want to give me a challenge just drop a comment on my LJ under the username demented_mei!

Chapter 2

I had Buddy drop me off at the Port so I could drop by my home before heading up into the woods surrounding the temple. As usual, I didn't wait for them to reach the dock, flying low to skim the ocean's surface, before I jumped from the deck to the waiting waters below. One of the best things about living on the ocean was swimming in it, and I was sure to do that every chance I got. Hey, living in a desert all your life can instill such a love of water in a girl. Besides, if I swam I could just make my way around the outer edges of the town and climb up out of the water on the deck around my house. Pretty nifty and convenient!

After having settled in here at the Port a year and a half ago I could swim around the edges of town to my house in record time, so it wasn't long before I was tugging myself up onto the back of the curving deck around my house. I loved that about Kilika. All of the homes here were so adorable and tropical, and living this close to the sea breeze was an incredible experience. I made my way around the deck, ducking low between my porch swing and the wall of the house, and headed inside. My house had been built after Vegnagun—at my own request, really—and was tucked away behind several other homes and apartments. It was amazing how much gil I'd managed to make sphere hunting. I'd built not the typical little home with another person living above or below me, but a two-story place instead. I was proud of it, and happy to call such a little place home.

Of course, being a thief myself, I never trusted people enough to not add on some extra security measures. After all, fabric doors may look cool, but they won't stop an intruder. So, aside from the fabric, I had a machina security system. It was a series of pipes, levers, and buttons that surrounded the doorframe of both my entrance door and the door upstairs that led to my second deck-slash-patio as well as all of my three windows. My doors didn't look any different if you weren't paying attention, but if someone came in that didn't clear my scan check the security system would block every exit and keep an intruder inside until I could get here to take care of the issue.

Wow, I am way off topic. I was dropping by to make sure I had my garment grids and to get rid of that damned sphere Yunie had thrown at me on the Celsius. A quick and easy thing to do, really. I took my curving stairs two at a time, ducking quickly through the beaded curtain that served as my bedroom door. I loved beads. Over by my big, built-in-the-wall bed was a waist high dresser that I'd covered in framed pictures. I kept my garment grids and dresspheres in the top left drawer.

From the very beginning Shinra had always made copies of every dressphere we picked up so that Yunie, Paine, and I could all have all of the spheres for our grids. It was probably a precaution we didn't really need to take since all of us had our own preferences as to which spheres we used more. The garment grids had been fun to split up. After we'd decided to go our separate ways, we tallied up how many of the things we'd collected. There were sixty total, which meant thirty each. We'd spent a good three hours at the table in the cabin with a huge pile of the grids in front of us. There were only a couple of disputes over a grid, and those were quickly settled with a game of rock, paper, scissors.

Personally, I was sure to never leave the house without the Samurai's Honor grid. It was sort of a tribute, really. With this mission, though, I wanted to have a nice collection to use when I needed them, and I certainly wasn't about to run off into Kilika Woods alone without the Chaos Maelstrom equipped. Yeah, like I actually wanted to be a dead Rikku. Kilika fiends may not be a HUGE deal, but that didn't mean they weren't just HUGE OUTRIGHT!

So, I scooped up a handful of the better grids and flopped over on my bed to switch out my dresspheres. Both the Samurai's Honor grid and the Chaos Maelstrom grid held six dresspheres, so I didn't have to do anything more than move them from one grid to the other. My six spheres were an odd combination. Of course I used the Thief sphere. It was made for me—BY me, actually—after all. I also tacked in the Alchemist sphere, another of my prodigies. After that things got a little odd. I used the Black Mage sphere, though I wasn't particularly good at it, and the Gun Mage sphere, which I was actually REALLY good at. Then came my heavy hitters. Much to everyone's surprise, I was the one of us Gullwings that mastered the Dark Knight and Samurai spheres. Yeah, me. Little Rikku. Can you guess why?

The Samurai is pretty obvious. I bet next to know one knows that it's actually Auron's sphere that we found on Yunie's pilgrimage. The Dark Knight—one of the oddest among dresspheres for the way it was activated—I use because I understand it. It's all about death and I think with all the people I've seen dead and dying that I know a bit about death.

Crap. Morbid again. The big plus of using the Dark Knight sphere was that I was pretty much everything-that-could-kill-me-proof. I liked that. Anyway, I grabbed my spheres and grids, snapped the drawer shut, and wrenched open the right hand drawer. It looked like a typical junk drawer, but all of the junk here consisted of the various accessories I'd collected. Some of them made it a literal junk drawer they were so useless, but I kept them all anyway. My favorite of all accessories was this nifty little thing called the Ochre Ring. It absorbs lightning and turns it into health like way too many ridiculous fiends do naturally. Take that astraphobia! I shoved that thing on my left hand like it was a god come to save me. Then, since I was in Kilika, I grabbed the Crimson Ring and crammed it on my right hand. I'm not a big fan of all the flashy fire stuff—for some reason getting over my fear of lightning made me love the stuff—but some of the Kilika fiends could do some nasty fire damage if you weren't paying attention. Plus, the ability to cast up Firaga was frickin' awesome when an Ochu popped its ugly head up.

With that done and the stupid sphere shoved in another drawer, I decided it was time to go. I reached under my bed just long enough to yank out my old pilgrimage-worn bedroll. I could forage for food. This island was literally covered in big, juicy fruit. See, to make sure I covered all of the woods I was going to beat my way around half of it today, camp out tonight, and beat through the rest up to the temple tomorrow instead of coming back to rest at my house. It was more efficient that way, and besides, I'd kinda missed camping.

Kilika Woods, here I come!

Gah, I was so fricking tired. I was at my camp site, in case you couldn't guess. The sun had set, like four hours ago. I hadn't filled my search quota by then so I went on using a portable lamp and some flash bombs until I was satisfied, which means I probably kept on considerably longer than Yunie or Tidus would have done. Vaguely I wondered if they'd had any luck in their searches, but then my muscles hurt so much that I couldn't really care.

The fiend population was freaking ridiculous. I'd never had to fight so many alone, so I really wasn't prepared to spend the whole day in the Dark Knight dressphere. Which is exactly what I had to do. Ugh, so tired. I was ready to sleep—I even had my bedroll spread out—but there was no way I was going to take off my best offensive and defensive weapon when there was a chance I'd get snuck up on. Even the machina perimeter guards I'd set up were no guarantee and alone it's kinda hard to set a watch considering, hey, I'm the only one there. So, fully armored, I laid down on my bedroll, flipped onto my stomach, and threw my hand to the hilt of the Masamune. No way was I going to wake up in the midst of being attacked without that thing in my hand and ready to slice n' dice whatever was playing alarm clock.

I dreamed. Not that that's something horribly out of the ordinary, but this dream was interesting. I dreamed that I was warm and loved, wrapped up in a strong pair of arms. Auron, of course, was the owner of said arms. We were kissing and he kept looking at me with an expression I could only describe as adoration—dreaming, remember. Dream Auron could be completely blitzed in love with me. He pulled back from the kiss, smoothing my hair away from my face, which was a bit sweaty, and whispered my name. It sounded like a sweet, precious prayer and for a second I knew just how Yevonites could have invested time and love into the prayers they sent to their false god.

Did I mention there was some major naked-ness? 'Cause there was. No clothes in sight for either of us.

Then, of course, what was a great dream went and got all weird. Next thing I knew, I was outside my body watching some tragic love story unfold. For some terrible reason that I couldn't fathom Auron was a summoner. It wasn't Sin he was fighting, but it was something bad and evil and part of me could just feel that without really knowing what he was up against. I watched as the two of us embraced in what looked to be a cave made of crystal. There were tears coursing done my face and his eyes were red.

"It's the only way," I kept saying to him.

And then, there was that dreamy scene change flash, and Auron was praying to a fayth, its statue placed deep in the crystal cave. Tears were falling from his cheeks as he prayed, and then I realized that he wasn't praying. He was grieving. Beneath the body of the fayth was a small woman with enormous yellow wings that almost matched the color of her hair: the aeon. The fayth…

The fayth was me.

I woke up crying. Bawling, more like. I wasn't sure why. It was getting near dawn, as I could see the sky lightening in the east, and not a single fiend had attacked me. I dragged myself from the bedroll and made quick work of tearing down camp. It was so much easier with one person instead of seven.

Another day of searching had begun.

I woke with a start lying face down in the sand. My head pounded, the sound of the howling sandstorm outside the safety of my coat doing nothing to lessen the excruciating pain. Everywhere twinges of pain were flooding me as my body was wracked by the swirling sands. For a long moment, the aching distracted me from the reason I had awoken.

I had dreamed. A very strange dream, at that. It wasn't a dream in the sense of a moving picture behind sleeping eyes. I felt things, emotions that had to be associated with events that were not being played out for me. First, a euphoria unlike any I have ever experienced, love and light and laughter, happiness incarnate spreading throughout my body until everything tingled with a constant strum of contentment. Then, slowly, a dawning realization that brought sorrow and pain, the same kind I had felt when I realized that Jecht and Braska were going to die for a false hope. Finally there was grief. Grief that could barely be contained within the name given to it and that consumed everything inside of me. All the while I could hear my own voice whisper the same prayer over and over, but I could not make out the one word I uttered.

The sand beneath my face was wet, as though it had absorbed a flood of tears. For all I knew, it had. There were no tears now, but my throat felt raw from whispers and grief. The air was thick with it beneath my coat, but I knew better than to remove it and face the howling storm. I would wait it out, both the now-fading grief of a vanishing dream and the storm that raged on around me.

I sat beside the CommSphere on the wall outside the steps that descended down to the temple atrium. The Celsius was supposed to pick me up here an hour or so before sunset. Time was getting close, but though I stared at the horizon I wasn't really looking for them.

I hadn't found him. Kilika Woods was as empty of Auron's presence as it had been for four years now, and I had searched every nook and cranny. I had had such hope for this search, such hope to find him, and even if I really knew that I couldn't expect him to turn up in the first place I looked, I still didn't KNOW that, and this was a big disappointment. I almost wanted to be angry with him, angry that he wasn't there when I called. I started to realize that this was how Yunie had felt our entire journey two years ago.

"Well, if isn't Cid's girl!"

Okay, Fate? Seriously. So not what I needed right now.

"I have a name, Gippal," I growled, exasperated. "Call me Rikku. I don't have to be tied to Pop my whole life, you know." I turned my head to the side to find him looking up at me from the sphere with one eyebrow raised. Why is it that all males can do that but I can't? The Moonflow glittered in the sunlight behind him.

"Someone's in a bad mood today. What's up?"

"Nothing I can talk to you about."

"Aw, come on, Rikku, you can talk to me about anything." Well, whaddya know. He can say my name without alcohol or orgasms involved. Huh. Wasn't sure I'd expected that.

"Right, anything." The list had already started scribbling itself down in my head. "Except, of course, Tidus and Yunie's relationship, Brother's annoyance with you, speculations as to why Nooj bothered with Leblanc, Spira before Sin's defeat, female monthly body cycles…feel free to stop me any time, you know, because your list of forbidden subjects is pretty damn long."

"Okay, so I guess I might deserve that." At least he had the sense to look a little bit sheepish. A black gloved hand appeared behind his head, two of the fingers raised and spread to give him bunny ears. Heh heh. I love it when Paine does that stuff. It's the only good part about him bugging me so much over the spheres. I smirked. "Hey, there's a smile!" Ah, how I hate that he always thinks it's his doing.

"She's smiling at me, dumbass," Paine said as she shoved her hand forward, knocking him across the back of the head. She bent down over his shoulder so I could see something besides her leggings and short shorts. Her other hand was still stretched out behind her. I, of course, liked to think that this was because she had only just let go of Nooj's hand. Hee. Matchmaker Rikku. "Everything alright, Rikku?" Her brow furrowed. "Why are you up at the temple instead of at your house?"

Oh crap. I hadn't thought about explanations to them yet. Wonder if Gippal knows he has possibly-still-dead competition? "Long story," I answered. Briefly, I thought about making up some wild story where I was searching for the one-night stand from beyond the grave (ignoring that there had been no one-night stand, of course), but I decided to just give them a vague truth that only Paine was likely to get. I focused on her, making sure I had her eyes. Paine and I had discussed this briefly in Guadosalam and again at Macalania before Vegnagun. "Do you remember that guy I told you about in Macalania?" Her eyes widened, but she nodded.

"Guy?" Wow, Gippal looked scared and angry all at once. And here I'd thought complex emotions outside the boundaries of flirting were beyond him. "What frickin' guy?" Paine smacked the back of his head, her brow furrowing again as she turned back to me.

"Yes, what about him?"

"He's not where you and I saw him last." You know, I'd never seen her eyebrows go that high before. "He won't show up for me, Tidus, or Yunie, so we're sure he's not there." I watched her mouth work silently for a bit.

"That's impossible," she finally whispered. Gippal was still muttering 'what guy' questions, but Baralai had come up behind him and clapped a hand over his mouth so that everything was muffled.

"Yeah, cacti with fiend-fighting beams of light were impossible too." I thought for a second. "Actually, a lot of the stuff that's happened since Yunie started her pilgrimage was impossible. Anyway, I'm on the hunt now. Yunie's checking over Besaid and Tidus is currently in Luca. We're shifting locations today."

Gippal made to ask me 'what guy' again and Paine actually shoved him backwards and out of sight of the camera. "Where's your next location?" she asked, and I realized that she was going to do her best to keep Gippal the hell away from me. Oh gratefulness I had never before known you as I did then.

"I'll be at Mushroom Rock. Yunie and Tidus are going to take Mi'ihen and Djose." Paine nodded, and we both looked up (her using the sphere's controls, duh) at the sound of whirring engines. The Celsius was roaring closer, its bright paint glistening in the sun. "Well, I think that means I'm off." Paine nodded again and mouthed a silent 'good luck.' Just before the sphere shut off I caught a glimpse of Gippal rushing it, trying to ask me about my quest once again.

Nooj tripped him with his cane. Hah.

When the airship got close enough to the enormous set of stairs leading up the hillside I caught sight of Tidus on the deck. He tossed a rope over its edge for me and together we managed to get my little butt back on board. Brother had started maneuvering the ship once again before we were even halfway across the deck, but it didn't really cause much problem. Both of us had fought in far worse conditions, after all.

Tidus told me he'd had no luck in Luca. I shouldn't have been surprised, really. Auron had always hated Luca. However, my hope was already on a thin thread from my own failure, and adding Tidus' to it just made everything worse. I guess I'd been telling myself to hold out for irony and he'd be in the place on Spira he liked least. I really should stop telling myself things. I only get my hopes up.

Besaid was a HUGE surprise. Instead of just Yunie meeting us at the docks, we found ourselves facing Wakka, Lulu, Vidina, and the entire Aurochs team as well. I felt tears prick the back of my eyes when they told me that all of them had volunteered to help Yuna search the island at the barest mention of Auron's name. Everyone gave well wishes for our search and a huge stack of letters to Auron was thrust into my hands. But the best part, above anything that had happened so far, was what Wakka said to me as soon as I turned to go back into the Celsius behind Yunie and Tidus.

"'Ey, Rikku!" I turned to find him, the last left behind of the group. "You be sure and tell Auron, when you find him, that I'm expecting him within the next month to come see my son, ya?" I could only nod mutely at him with a big smile, tears filling my eyes.

Not 'if you find him.' When.