Everything Looks Better Ch. 08

"I apologize in advance," he grated, impaling her as though his life depended on it, immediately driving into a rhythm and Raine locked her teeth together to hold in a scream. Their friction was harsh at first without the lubrication of foreplay.

While Auron thrust his way to his own selfish objective, Raine found herself mesmerized by the pink and green bubbles in their purposeless drift around the ceiling. She forgot herself, everything else fading away into the background. The walls, the bed, the floor all dropped from sight, leaving only those beautifully hypnotizing balls of clear colors, innocent and almost playful in their delicate collisions. Somehow, their presence was her fault, but she couldn't piece it together. The Summoner dance made Pyreflies out of dead fiends, but there were no fiends here...were there?

"Don't look at them," he said gruffly and grabbed her chin. "Look at me."

She met his eye without seeing him, allowing her body to be jostled by Auron's tempo, her butt cheeks burning from the scuff of the rug. But now his pumps were weakening, his penis softening inside her as he made an ugly grimace, bearing his teeth soundlessly. Exhausted, he dropped forward, planting his hands on the floor above her shoulders as his hips began to lose momentum. Three more Pyreflies appeared, lazily floating up to the ceiling.

Distract them.

Raine blinked and focused on Auron with fresh concentration.

Distract them.

Clamping her vagina, Raine clinched her legs around his waist, pushing up on her elbows. "Flip," she snapped.

Collapsing sideways, Auron gripped her hips and the motion was almost like correcting an overturned kayak as Raine managed to hang on to him with her knees, using abdominal muscles she didn't know she had to swing up on top of him. Letting the cloak slide down her arms, she tossed it aside, situated for better traction, bracing against his chest with the flat of her hands. She commenced a quick, steady rhythm, commanding his eye contact.

"Stay with me," she ordered.

Another stray Pyrefly appeared out of nowhere, an extension of Auron's body, skipping a path of dry, icy kisses up the front of her, sending shivers to her spine, her skin prickling with bumps, her nipples hardening. It brushed by her cheek, whispered something inarticulate in her ear and was gone. A moan came out of her before she could stop it.

Raine didn't expect a fourth orgasm, since previous to this night they had been most commonly accidental, feigned, or self-generated, but she shifted slightly, plummeting with purpose as she felt the footing of an upcoming climax. At first she was afraid distracting them might mean an erotic performance of sorts, but as Auron followed her with a hungry eye, she knew she just needed to contribute. Soon, Auron began driving with confidence, his hips lifting off the floor, jouncing her into a solid beat, his lips parting in pant. She had not seen another Pyrefly since the last one made her moan.

Her orgasm began as shy trickle of release, followed by a wild cascade of flailing control and guttural pleas, the sight of which made Auron retreat inward to claim his own relief. The muscles bulged in his neck and his back arched off the rug. The frosty discharge was both familiar and anticipated now, yet Raine still winced when he came and her final shudder was the competing result of opposing sensations. She dipped forward in a fuss of apologetic kisses and Auron's drowsy lips struggled to keep up.

"Come here," he mumbled, the strength and authority in his voice was replaced with something lethargically fragile.

He shifted sideways under her and she tumbled to the floor, cuddling close to him, her nose buried in his chest hair. Her eyes immediately closed and she couldn't explain why she was afraid to open them. For a moment she just listened to his breathing as he wrestled to subdue it, tangling his limbs around her.

"Are you cold?" he whispered.

She realized she was violently trembling, her back muscles aching from the relentless seizing. "No."

But you are.

One of his arms left her for a moment and she heard the hiss of blankets as Auron dragged the coverlet from the bed and snuggled it around them. It didn't stop the shaking.

"Auron—" she croaked.

"No questions," he rumbled. "I'm tired. Let me sleep for a bit."

Raine burrowed her face deeper into his chest and the thick wad in her throat made it hard to talk. "Don't leave."

He weakly chuckled. "I'm not going anywhere. You're my anchor."

Anchor? That sounded like a lot to live up to.

Auron's legs and arms slacked around her, his breathing relaxed and deep. Raine tried to let sleep take her, but her heart was pounding too much to unwind and another vicious tremor put a kink in her back. Auron was lousy at keeping her warm. Carefully, she slid out of his arms, dragging her legs out from under his.

Overhead, the final Pyrefly finally bumped its way around the room to join the others and they bopped around the ceiling in a loose cloud. Raine shut her eyes to them, feeling ill, but she could still hear their whispering. If she listened carefully, she could hear the rustling beat of conversation, but she couldn't understand the words.

She hunted down her pajamas, which wasn't easy. She remembered her bottoms were in the bathroom, but her top was a little more of a challenge. After kneeling down on the other side of the bed, she found it had been kicked under the bed and she wrestled it over her head right away. Her pretty white underwear was crammed underneath one of the pillows at the head of the bed, but they were a little ripe, so she hid them at the bottom of the top dresser drawer and selected another pair of the clean briefs Auron had bought for her.

She cleaned up on the toilet, realizing with a groan why Auron felt so cold inside her. It was so obvious now. She was usually smarter than this, but it was like she didn't want to see it or was suppressing it or something. Something else popped into her mind and she covered her face with both hands, propping her elbows on her knees as she whimpered in mortification. That day at her mother's funeral, she told Auron she didn't believe in zombies. She said it so arrogantly like a know-it-all and she thought she was being funny about it. But as she recalled, it was the only time that day she thought she saw him smile. Auron wasn't so thin-skinned to be easily offended. And how was she expected to know?

Flushing the toilet, Raine stepped into fresh underwear, but removed the garter from her thigh for the second time and set it next to the sink. Whatever game Auron wanted to play with it, she wasn't in the mood. She shook the wrinkles out of her pajama bottoms before jumping into them and then stood in the door way to check on Auron. His head was lying on his own arm and he was still sleeping. It was strange to see. She had never seen him sleep before, so ordinary, face drooping, lips separated. He was startlingly vulnerable.

How long was he going to sleep? She wondered if she should try to wake him but then decided against it. She needed some sleep, too. When he did finally wake up, she needed to be well rested for the conversation that would follow.

She ran the tap in the bathroom and washed her hands, avoiding her reflection in the mirror. She didn't want to face herself and she could tell from the vague outline her hair was atrocious.

Unsent, she thought, and it was like she was realizing for the first time what the word entailed. No wonder he stood so far away while she practiced the sending dance in Macalania Woods. He didn't want to be accidentally sent. Did that mean he was a fiend? No, of course not. That didn't happen until later, when they were finally overcome with envy of the living.

Drying her hands on the towel, Raine smiled. She would have to remind herself not to rub it in so much that she was alive. She wouldn't want to make him jealous and have him turn into a fiend. She giggled at the thought and wondered what kind of fiend he would be. She knew it would be something big, grumpy and cyclopean and would probably have horns with skunk-streaked patches of fur. Snickering out loud, Raine tried to smother it with a hand, but she couldn't contain it. Afraid she would wake Auron, she fell against the door to close it. The hilarity of the situation was irrepressible and she slid down the door to the floor as she continued laughing, snaking her arms around her belly to hug herself and that's when she realized she wasn't laughing. She wasn't laughing at all.

Tightening her arms around her stomach, Raine sobbed uncontrollably, trying to self-soothe the lonely ache in her, the all-too-familiar pain of loving someone who would eventually leave her.

Spent, Raine let the back of her head hit the bathroom door with a hollow whump. Nature's best exfoliator, the drying tears made her face taut; her eyes burned and she could feel a headache coming on from the dehydration. But it was the laughing in the next room that made her start.

Auron. He was awake.

Scrambling to her feet, she swung open the door. Auron was on the floor, still asleep. He hadn't moved an inch since she last saw him.

She heard the laugh again, an eerily cheerful sound, and the impossibility of it made her taste fear, a metallic residue on the back of her tongue. Stepping out of the bathroom, she gave the room a paranoid glance to confirm she was alone.

"You know, when I was a kid, I had such a crush on you," someone said.

Raine yelped, covering her mouth to contain her fright.

Contemplating the likelihood it was her own delighted madness, Raine heard the laughing again, this time straight above her. Raine craned her neck to look up at the butting Pyreflies on the ceiling. Through their attraction, they became agitated, jockeying for space, and an aura of colorful, embodying light filled the spaces between them with transparent images, too faint to easily see.

With an irritable glance at the lamp on the dresser, Raine approached and fumbled under the shade until she found the switch. The room darkened, except for the Pyreflies' festively colorful mood lighting. Together, the Pyreflies became a kind of projector, skipping through parts of a movie, both the picture and sound caught in a repeating loop. The movie was of her. Sleeping, talking, smiling, laughing and one where she was making a terrible face to be funny, all shot in different perspectives, different times, different ages, different clothes.

"You know, when I was a kid, I had such a crush on you," she said to the camera, dressed in her cheerleading uniform, standing on the sidewalk at night, just outside her great aunt's house in C-South. More images flitted by, the sound of her own laughing ringing in the room.

Raine dragged her eyes away to look at Auron, lightly snoring against his arm. Was he dreaming? Was she watching him dream on the projection of his own Pyreflies?

No, no, no. Not dreams. She was just a child when Auron had told her—told Tidus, actually, while she was eavesdropping—that they were visions of the past. Pyreflies contained memories. In this case, Auron's memories, filtered in the off-white tint of his sunglasses.

Abruptly, the movie quit, the molecules becoming instable as the cloud drifted over the bed. Raine stumbled as she followed them, bending her neck rather unnaturally to see the picture as it briefly dimmed then brightened as another scene faded in. Crawling up on the bed, she kneeled in the center of it, her hands in her lap as she gazed straight up.

A smoky void of darkness emerged in the center of the Pyreflies' haze and Raine realized it wasn't emptiness, but Auron's recollection of a dark place. Human shapes darted through his vision, too fast for Raine to identify and Raine felt a dip of vertigo as flashes of lemon yellow crossed the screen.

"This is far enough," said a voice, male, too smooth to be Auron's.

The sway of Auron's vision slowed for a moment then swung grandly sideways, through a murky cavern of collapsed, broken pillars and mounds of destruction. A small, distant cluster of people came into view, but it was just a confirmatory glance, to make sure he hadn't been followed, and the inside of Auron's sunglasses swept back to the swatch of yellow in front of him. Someone was wearing a yellow jacket with a dirty white hood, his shaggy blond hair shaking as he spun around to face Auron.

Raine whimpered and covered her mouth in disbelief. Tidus. Her older brother was younger than she was now, but it was him, from the past.

Auron's field of vision merely bobbed up to Tidus' face, as though he were unable to look her brother in the eye and Raine became frustrated, willing Auron to settle his gaze more definitely on Tidus so she could at least look at her brother. It had been a long time since she had seen him and she didn't remember her brother looking so strong. He fidgeted less, his stance near stoic. But even during Auron's too-brief peek upon on his face, Raine could see Tidus' eyes shining with emotion.

The depressing hue of Auron's sunglasses exasperated her. Is that how Auron preferred to see the world?

"You remember my sister, don't you Auron?"

"Of course." Auron's voice sounded peculiarly muffled, vibratory, what he might sound like in his head.

"What will happen to Raine when the fayth stop dreaming?"

Fayth? Did he mean the hooded boy in the book of Summoning, the boy she saw on the bus in Zanarkand? Why would that boy's dreams have anything to do with her?

Auron's gaze swiftly lifted to Tidus' face. He didn't say anything, but the silver chain around Tidus' neck shifted as he lowered his head in defeat, as if Auron had answered with a simple facial expression.

"I was hoping to find a way to bring her here, but—" Tidus swallowed hard, Auron keeping only a wedge of Tidus' face in his vision. Then Tidus raised his head, searching passed Auron, regally holding the tears as they welled in his eyes.

Following Tidus' gaze, Auron's vision swept through the dim cavern and Raine recognized the glowing tails of other Pyreflies drifting around the ruins. There was something familiar to Raine about the broken statues in the background, the ripped wallpaper, the paneled walls and the arched hallway.

Again, the picture settled on the group of people behind Auron, this time long enough for Raine to distinguish between them. Three of them crouched in mournful prayer, another was audibly sobbing as she paced and a majestic, shadowy figure, which Raine couldn't see right away, except for its glowing yellow eyes. A Ronso.

They were the people from Auron's last pilgrimage and Raine quickly sought out Lulu, barely visible in her dark furs and strange leathery skirt with the ambiguous lattice design. She was the dark one. The one too dark for Auron. She was kneeling next to Yuna, who Raine only recognized because of her Summoner's robe, and a stocky, red-headed man in Blitzball shorts. Raine confirmed Lulu's beauty, her long, raven hair, purple lips and dark eyes and realized Auron must have been an ass-man to overlook breasts like hers.

The scene made another sickening sidelong sweep, resting on Tidus and the whole camera dipped once; a nod. "I'll find a way to bring your sister here."

"I can't ask you to do that, Auron, you've already done so much," Tidus whispered and slanted his head at Auron. "Ever consider retirement, old man?"

Old man. Tidus said it with a husk of endearment, not with the usual bitterness when he was referring to their father.

"Hmph. Never."

Tidus stared at Auron miserably, a tear dropping unceremoniously on his cheek. "Serious?"

Auron said nothing.

With a sigh, Tidus went on, shaking his head. "I have to do this. Yuna...I—I can't live without her, you know?"

"Hmph," Auron said and Raine knew Auron most definitely did not know.

"And—" Tidus smashed shut his eyes, forcing a definitive nod. "It's the right thing to do."

Auron snorted. "Your father said those exact words at this junction in the pilgrimage. He had hoped becoming Sin would give his life meaning."

Raine scoffed at this. At the same time, so did Tidus. It startled her because it was like a perfect echo. Good to see they both saw their father in such high regard.

"Auron, if it doesn't work this time, if I'm reborn as Sin, bring Raine with you on your next pilgrimage."

"What shall I bring her back as?"

Bemused, Tidus's clear blue eyes were glued to Auron and it was the strangest feeling. For a brief moment, Tidus was looking directly at Raine. "What do you mean 'as what'?"

"Mage? Swordswoman?" Auron offered.

"Summoner," Tidus said grimly and the word plunged from her brother's lips like an anvil.

Auron's eye was slowly drifting away before this, but it jerked back to Tidus' dark expression. "You—" Auron paused. Raine got the impression Auron was genuinely startled. "You're sure?"

"Promise me you'll look after her. Maybe you can talk some sense into her," Tidus said and folded his arms, grumpy, glaring reproachfully. "I don't like her new boyfriend."

Raine burst out laughing, but with the hot tears in her eyes it was almost a sob. Oh, Tidus. My protective older brother, she thought.

And then something cold nestled in her chest cavity as she pictured the fleet of Sinspawn, the way they encroached the beach during her and Jory's wedding. How much exactly did Tidus not like her boyfriend? Enough to sabotage the wedding?

"I give you my word," Auron said. "I'll take care of your sister. I'll guard her with my life."

There was a loyal determination in the way he said it, but Raine couldn't tell if the devotion was aimed for Tidus or for Raine.

Pyreflies dispersing, the movie faded and Raine couldn't stop the roll in her stomach as she leaped off the bed and ran for the bathroom.

Scooping tap water into her mouth, Raine ignored the sewer taste as she rinsed and spit the vomit taste out of her mouth.

Raine returned to the main room. The Pyreflies were finished showing her Auron's memories and they bumped against the window, trapped, asking to be liberated. Releasing the window, Raine quickly stepped back as the Pyreflies whooshed out, swirling around the snow yard, eager for freedom, and she followed their comet tails spiraling below, where someone was shoveling snow off the walkway. Raine leaned out the window as the Pyreflies whizzed by Rin, attracting his attention. He stood his shovel upright like a staff as he watched them go, and then turned up to the second floor. It was so quiet that Raine could hear Rin's boots squeaking in the packed snow as he walked around to face the building. He saluted her, bowed slightly. Raine slowly waved.

From a distance, their gazes locked as they shared a moment. Rin looked like he wanted to say something and with a sympathetic gesture, his head tilted, motioning inside, an invitation. Raine nodded and Rin attacked the ground with his shovel, flinging the last of the snow sideways.

Raine found Auron's red cloak twisted around one of his legs and she yanked it, glancing with a flinch at Auron to make sure she hadn't woken him, and gently lifted one of his bare feet to slowly unravel the garment free. She put it on just for the sake of modesty and dropped to her knees next to Auron to lightly kiss the place where his forehead met his high hairline. He stirred, nuzzled his cheek against his arm as he adjusted in his sleep, his lips smacking once.