Final Fantasy - All Series Fan Fiction ❯ Guardian ❯ Flashpoint ( Chapter 6 )

Guardian, Chapter 6
Flashpoint

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Forgoing the armor, I grabbed my discarded coat from the back of the chair and pulled it over my bare skin. A clean shirt would have been nice, but the only one I owned hung in the bathroom, still drying from my attempt at hand-washing it. The 'washing machine' had looked a bit ominous, and the boy's vague instructions on its use had been less than helpful. I couldn't bring myself to wear any of Jecht's clothes, and not just because most of them were the kind of thing I wouldn't have been caught dead in.

The soft sobbing continued, the mournful sound reaching my ears even more clearly as I stepped into the hallway. I found young Tidus crying alone in his bedroom as if his heart were broken beyond repair, smothering great gasping sobs into his pillow, barely able to breathe. I approached him warily, my guarded steps suited more to facing a fiend of unknown strength than a small, lachrymose child. Yevon help me, what am I supposed to do now? For one as deeply rooted in his newfound apostasy as I, his name had been on my lips a lot of late.

The boy sat up and choked off his tears as soon as he sensed my presence, trying to look brave and stoic and failing miserably. Ducking his head in shame, he refused to meet my gaze. What had Jecht called him? A 'crybaby'? Well, it was no secret that there was much Jecht had never understood. Tidus was a mere boy, and he was losing his whole world, everything that was familiar and secure. Carefully, I clasped his small shoulder, my bare hand monstrous in comparison.

"There's no shame in tears, boy." And suddenly I found myself with an armful of sobbing, miserable child, wetness soaking fast into the thick fabric of my coat. After a moment, at a bit of a loss, I gathered him up with one arm and sat on the bed, stroking his silken hair as he cried out his sorrow. I was most uncomfortable, but the boy had no one else to console him; his mother had shut out everyone's pain but her own. Gradually, he quieted, his sobs trailing off into small, sad hiccups.

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He was so big, and warm...solid and real. He let me sit on his lap and cry without telling me to "Shut up and be a man," or "Stop being such a damned crybaby." It was so nice, but I wanted more than anything for Papa to have held me this way, just once...and now he never would, not ever...

Why did mom have to love him so much? She always loved him better than me...and now he's gone, and she's leaving.

But I'm right here--

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"Better?" I asked, the husky rasp in my voice put there only by the early hour, or so I told myself.

Tidus looked up, sniffling. Something in his eyes tore at my own deadened heart, as he choked out, "I don't want her to die, too!"

My body tensed involuntarily as an irrational anger tore through my veins, the taste of pained hapless fury bitter on my tongue. Her death was so pointless. "She won't." I didn't recognize my own voice, iced over with an unfamiliar chill. "I won't let her." Jecht would never forgive me.

Removing the boy from my lap, I stalked out of the room and into Serra's, pulling her ungently out of the bed by the arms. Without care for modesty or easily bruised flesh, my fingers dug mercilessly into her too-cool skin, her nightdress slipping open at the neck as her slack form complied unresistingly. Tidus followed after, staring through the doorway, his small face shocked and a little afraid. Her clouded eyes opened and looked at me, but the pale grey irises didn't see me. I shook her furiously, willing her to snap out of it. It had no effect, and so with calculated force I dealt her an open-handed blow across the face.

"Serra!"

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It was the first time that I could remember ever seeing any expression at all on his features. His sudden blazing fury seared through his hands into my arms, his viselike grip biting painfully into my flesh. The near heat of him was almost unbearably hot, making me shiver suddenly with the realization of how cold I was. But I saw it all from far, far away, as if it were happening to someone else. Even his voice raging heatedly at me sounded muted and distant, unintelligible.

My vague incomprehension further enraged him, and a foul epithet reached my ears as he half-carried, half-dragged me to the window, yanking the curtains back so suddenly that they tore from the wall and flooded the comfortingly dim room with harsh blinding brightness. My child was crying and shouting at him to stop, pulling at his arms with all of the effect of an ant trying to stop a hurricane. I tried to drag my thoughts up from the clinging fog that engulfed them, tried to kick away from the murky underwater depths of my sorrow and swim for the surface.

"Tidus," was all that I could manage, in a whisper audible only to my own ears.

The man who held me turned my head forcibly to look out the window into the glaring sunlight. "Look at your garden, Serra. It dies." Roughly, he bore me back around to face the room at my back. "Look at your son," he bit out harshly. Tidus was sitting bonelessly on the floor, eyes wide, with a shocked look of fear and abject sorrow on his small face. "He needs a mother." His hold moved to my shoulders as he shifted me to face him, his gaze boring deeply into even my soul. His eye blazed mahogany fire, his features twisted with sorrow and a host of other emotions so tangled with each other that they were impossible to discern.

"Don't give up and die, Serra! Don't throw your life away, as I did!"

The normally mirrored russet of his lone eye had gone completely pellucid, revealing the fathomless depths beneath, and I knew from the torment swirling within that the strange words he spoke were entirely true, though the meaning escaped me.

My voice was rusty from unuse, my throat cracked and painfully dry. But his anguished sorrow prevailed where anger had not. "What do you mean?"

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Her violet-grey eyes gazed back at me, uncomprehending, waiting for clarification. There was no taking the words back now, and if they could somehow convince her to live I didn't want to. The rest flooded out of me in a low undertone, as I hated even to speak of what I had not yet come to terms with myself.

"I couldn't take the utter loneliness, the crushing guilt that came from being the only one left standing. For so long, it had been just the three of us against the world, and then it was just me, and their deaths were meaningless. Sin was doomed to return." I closed my eye helplessly as memory overcame me with razor-sharp talons, slicing into my flesh, my heart. "It tore my mind apart, and in my insane fury I sought out Yunalesca the liar, and threw myself at her, lunging at her with all of my strength, but whether it was to kill her or have her kill me I still do not know."

Taking a deep breath, I fought back to the present and opened my eye to face her. "I did not care about my life anymore, without them, but my death had no meaning, either. Yunalesca survived to deceive those who followed after, and I was unable to move on, bound by the promises I'd made, caught in a hellish limbo between death and life. Unable to live, denied the peace of death. Living and dead and neither." Incredibly, in her face was no skepticism, no doubt of the truth of my words. Her eyes held a world of pitying horror, shimmering with unshed tears.

"Life is precious, Serra. Jecht would not have wanted you to waste yours." I touched her hair. "I do not want you to waste it. I cannot bear to witness any more pointless death." Don't make me.

"Auron." My name was a sigh. "You are right. I...will try." She slumped against me, and I froze, unsure of where it might be proper to hold a dead friend's wife. Tentatively, I wrapped my arms around her slender shoulders, swallowing her slight form in my reluctant embrace. Her arms locked around my neck, and finally, for the first time in weeks, she let herself cry.

I should say now that I meant only to save her; I never meant to fall in love with her. I had thought my heart dead and empty, that all that remained to animate this body were the heavy shackles of Duty that still tethered my weary soul to its flesh. But she, she made me laugh, a man who had not known much laughter even while he lived. She made me care, she made me love, she made me rail again at Fate and in the end, she made prove that the dead can, in fact, still weep. But I suppose I am getting ahead of myself.

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End Chapter 5

~Sango (sango_chan@hotmail.com)