Everything Looks Better Ch. 03

Jecht's houseboat was the least maintained of all the vessels in the Zanarkand Marina.

It was overdue for a reseal, the underside crusted in Sinscale spines, the sails were ripped, the lines frayed and all of the internal machina was rusty. The inside fared no better. The tidal wave from the Sin attack 3 years ago and a malfunctioning pump made for damp carpets and mold. With no power, the cooling unit smelled like something died in it and judging from the old fishing equipment on deck, something just might have. Arachnid webs blanketed the cluttered shelf of Jecht and Tidus' old Blitzball trophies, the sailing books were warped, the rounded sectional in the center of the cabin had a family of geckos in it...

...and Raine wanted to live there.

Auron couldn't forbid it. No one could. The boat was hers by default when her mother died and so was the dock space it inhabited.

Raine had asked him to meet her there. Redundant, of course. He would already be following her. But it was her tactful way of letting him know she expected his company. Auron knew which route of sun-bleached boardwalks to take from when Tidus lived there, but as he approached the boat ramp, he heard the music inside, something trendy that rattled the windows. Knocking would be futile, so he let himself in.

The screen on the door was torn, the hinges loose, and it wouldn't close all the way because the door frame had warped. Inside, it didn't take long for the fishy smell to hit him. It made his eye water as he stood on the landing, looking down into the circular parlor. The stucco walls were marked with a grimy flood line about 2-3 feet from the layer of dried mud that was the floor.

Raine had pushed all the furniture to one side of the room and was using a broom as a dance partner, singing the words of the song to it, twirling around a pile of debris she had apparently been cleaning up. Auron leaned against the unsteady banister and watched her performance with quiet amusement.

Eventually, she saw him and shrieked. The broom dropped to the floor with a hasty thwack and she immediately ran to the portable radio to turn it down.

"How long have you been standing there?" she asked breathlessly. She was wearing pink shorts and a pink tank top under one of her brother's old, oversized Abes jerseys, typical attire for outside chores back at her great-aunt's house in C-South.

Auron started down the steps into the remains of the living area and leaned his katana against the wall. "Not long."

"Well you're just in time. I'm about to break for lunch."

Glancing around, Auron wondered how much work she'd done to earn a break, and noticed a red plaid blanket had been spread out picnic-style on the floor. In the kitchen niche at the back of the room, Raine hoisted down a basket from the filthy island counter.

Auron affected remorse as best as he could. "I'm not hungry."

"Go figure. But I made these sandwiches myself, so just pretend, okay?" She kneeled down on the blanket and began unloading foil wrapped food items from the basket, arranging them into two place settings. "And sit. You make me nervous standing that way."

Sighing inwardly, Auron settled cross-legged at one corner of the blanket as Raine thrust a sandwich into his gauntlet. He noticed her knees were dirty and there were mud stains on her shorts and her ponytail was messy with sweaty fly-ways. She appeared to have been working hard on something, but it wasn't apparent in the present room.

Auron used his tucked hand sparingly to remove the foil from his sandwich and bit into it without checking to see what kind it was. Raine sat on her hip with her legs to the side and draped a cloth napkin on one thigh as she ate with small bites. She stole glances at him while he chewed. There had been only one other instance he'd eaten in front of her and he had to endure the skeptic stares of her great aunt and uncle, who had evidently been expecting someone different when Raine announced she was bringing someone home for dinner.

"What is this?" he asked around his food.

"Tuna fish."

Auron stopped chewing a beat. "I mean, what are we doing on your father's houseboat?"

"To celebrate. I'm moving in."

He took another large bite, taking no enjoyment of the flavors, just for the sake of appeasing her. "By yourself?"

"Not with Jory, if that's what you mean."

"That's not what I said."

"That's what you meant," she sang. "Besides, Jory took one look at the place and turned his nose up at it."

"Maybe it was the smell."

She straightened her neck and frowned apologetically. "Does it still smell? I opened all the windows that weren't painted shut. I must be used to it. I've been here since dawn. But you knew that."

He did. What he didn't know was what she'd been doing since then. Everything was still in shambles.

"I can't live with my aunt and uncle anymore. They tell me I can stay until I'm done with college, but I wasn't expecting to stay with them after high school. Jory promised he'd—" Her eyes met his for a split second before she slid them back down to her sandwich, preoccupied as she picked off an invisible speck from her next bite. She didn't finish her thought and nodded with new determination. "It's best this way."

"It's not livable."

"It will be when I fix it up."

"Hmph."

Something flittered in the corner of Auron's eye and as he turned to look, a gecko skittered onto the blanket, a brown ridge of bone tracing down its spine. Its long green tail twitched as it looked at Raine with a narrow, cocked head, its beady yellow eyes staring greedily and curiously at her sandwich. Raine screamed, threw her sandwich at it and scrabbled backwards like a crab. With a lipless mouth, the gecko bit into the soft bread and gulped down a large bite.

Auron shoved the rest of his sandwich into his mouth and patted the crumbs off his hands and lap as he got to his feet. Balanced on one leg, he centered a boot over the lizard.

"Stop!"

Far out of the gecko's reach, Raine was kneeled on the back of the crescent shaped couch with her hand stretched forward to halt him. She looked at Auron, horrified.

"It's a pest," Auron reasoned.

"It's a baby."

The lizard gummed another piece off the sandwich, unaware how close to death it was.

"What would you like done?"

"Just—put it outside."

Auron rolled his eye. He wrapped his gauntlet around the end of its tail and picked it up, a section of tuna fish and bread still wedged in its mouth as it tried to swallow while swaying upside down. On his way to the door, Auron held the critter away from his body, battling with its flexing tail as it thrashed to escape. At the threshold, he started to swing the critter way back—

"Gently!" Raine called.

—and instead dangled it over the deck until its claws frantically scrabbled at the wood surface. Auron released it and it scampered across the boards, down the ramp, its slender tail whipping behind as it made a sharp turn straight into the bay.

Back in the living area, Raine had slipped down leerily from her gecko-free sanctuary on top of the couch cushions and sat alert on the blanket. Her eyes slid tensely to a dark frayed hole in the upholstered furniture.

"You know there's probably more," Auron said, lips quirking as he strode by her.

"Where are you going?" she asked anxiously.

"To see what you're getting yourself into."

Flanking the kitchen were two short hallways leading to the bedrooms. She was right about the smell, it did go away after a while, but another musty stench led him into the only bathroom, an adjoining one, off one of the bedrooms. It looked like it would be functional once the water was turned back on, as long as the plumbing was undamaged. The bedroom was considered the master, but it was tiny, just big enough for the slumped bed, a bedside table and a dresser, all discolored from water damage. The shag carpeting was rumpled, packed with black sludge and still squelched in some areas when he walked across it. A locked door at the back of the room led to a back deck with a pleasing view of the ocean, but the area was littered with overturned and broken patio furniture, pushed around by the flood and other storms. Around the door frame, the walls were crumbling and Auron squatted down, sticking a finger into the plaster and pulling off parts of the wall in chalky chunks. A layer of green fuzz covered the wooden studs inside the wall and the insulation had disintegrated.

The place wasn't even safe to stand in, let alone sleep in.

"Auron!" Raine called from another part of the houseboat. "Can you come here?"

Not another gecko.

Back in the main room, Auron circled around the kitchen to the other hallway, where there were two other bedrooms, half the size of the master bedroom. The first one was so full of junk he couldn't get a foot in. He found Raine in the second one, which was nearly empty. The carpeting had been pulled up and all the loose dirt and carpet staples had been swept into a black lump in the middle of the room. She was sitting on the twin bed, just a bed frame, a bare mattress and a pillow with no case.

He shook his head at her. "It needs to be gutted."

"I've got all summer before school starts."

"It needs new insulation."

"You don't think I can do it? I can hire people to do the work. I have my inheritance."

He knew about the inheritance. Jecht spent most of his money drinking and gambling and Tidus had not been a star player very long, so whatever was left could not have been much, considering her mother still needed to work to make ends meet. "You'll burn through it just getting a crew out here to take down the walls. And you need it for school."

She frowned. "Why are you being so difficult?"

"This is too much work for you."

"No it isn't. I cleaned out this whole room in just one morning."

Auron scowled. Her priorities were skewed. Why put so much effort into one room when there were other rooms that needed more attention?

With a sneaky grin, she pointed to something behind him and he looked over his shoulder. When he saw what she was pointing at, Auron rotated all the way around and just stared.

"I thought it was a good place for it," she said. "What do you think?"

Auron approached it apprehensively. He was afraid the bracket might fall from the load of his katana, which Raine must have snatched while he was inspecting the bathroom. But she had drilled the brace straight into the studs behind the wall and it appeared quite sturdy.

No one had offered him a place to hang his sword before. There were often two or three to a room back at the monastery in Bevelle and inns were always temporary, although he supposed this too would be temporary; he had 7 years left before Sin's rebirth.

He wasn't sure how to feel about Raine's offer, although he reacted similarly at her graduation 6 weeks ago. He had been standing at the back of the auditorium with the late arrivals and he felt fine during her valedictorian speech, but sensed a heavy constriction in his throat when she accepted her diploma. Tidus never graduated high school. He had opted to put it on hold and finish in the off-season so he could play center for the Zanarkand Abes. Auron had to step out to the lobby to collect himself, but there was no opportunity to do that now.

"This way you can keep your promise to my brother and you don't have to skulk in the bushes to do it."

"No," he decided crustily.

He heard the squeak of springs as she got to her feet. "No?"

"Did you not hear me?" He wrapped his fist around the hilt and lifted it off the bracket with a weighty clank.

"I heard you," she admitted with a tremor. "May I ask why?"

Auron kept his back to her and rested his sword on his shoulder. "You expect us to be roommates?"

"I wasn't expecting anything. I thought it was a nice gesture."

He peeked back at her. In his peripheral vision, he saw her step forward cautiously, diffidently.

"Are you angry with me?" she asked.

"I'm not angry," Auron said, but even he knew his tone alleged otherwise. It wasn't because she asked him to move in. It was because he wanted to. "My sword is very heavy. Don't handle it again without my help."

"Okay, I won't," she whispered and the obedient nod that followed suggested fear.

Auron started to leave the room.

"Are you leaving?"

"Break time is over," Auron said in the doorway. "Demolition starts now. Get your broom."

Macalania Temple loomed shadowy and archaic under the ice as the late evening sun tilted off the arctic lake, the monotonous grind of their boots on the frozen road oppressively tense. Usually Auron didn't discriminate between silences, preferring quiet over any type of silence, whether it was comfortable or awkward, but Auron relied on Raine's prompts a little too much, he realized. There was more she needed to know, but without her pesters, he couldn't seem to find the words.

Raine was wearing the provisions he'd acquired for her from the bazaar in Kilika, the tan coat made of dingo fur, insulated with chocobo feathers, and the gloves boiled from behemoth skin. She hefted the handle of the staff to her other shoulder, sniffing from the cold.

"Want me to carry that?" Auron asked. Already his katana was over his left shoulder and the dense book of Yevon's teachings was under the opposite arm, but sometimes the swooping way she fidgeted with her rod made him nervous.

"I've got it," she muttered.

Before the revelation in Macalania Woods spoiled her concentration, Raine had been a better student than Auron was a teacher. The woman who once fled at the sight of a baby gecko stood up to a chimera's aqua-breath today, but he supposed the attack of Sinspawn during her wedding in Zanarkand helped her better realize her own durability. On only her third try, she had extracted a dozen Pyreflies from a small Iguion, but he tried not to seem too encouraging, alluding beginner's luck. Her fourth Iguion struck an endless leak and by her eighth and ninth, the lizards were detonating into a colorful swarm of delicate orbs before she had even properly begun the dance. It was difficult to give her the praise she deserved. Every time she sent a new Iguion, she'd give him that hopeful, expectant look, hungry for approval, and it pained him to deny it from her, but already she was sending a piece of him away along with every sent fiend, a section not already claimed by the Pyreflies.

In any case, he found himself drifting back a step farther than the last during the sending dance, and those last few Iguions he only nearly got out of the way in time before she stirred up the Pyreflies in him, a constant bilious gnawing in the back of his brain, insects crawling on the inside of his skull. The distress made him irritable. He didn't have this concern in Zanarkand, but now that he was back in Spira, all his old problems were still waiting for him.

Toying with her rod again, she wearily rolled it off the curve of her shoulder, swinging it in a way that made Auron edgy as the Pyreflies pulsed.

"Give me that," he snapped.

Pinching the book to the side of his ribs with his elbow, he tore the staff out of her hands, confiscating it. Immediately, he regretted his ill-temper as her face went from startled to sullen, her gloves disappearing broodingly into her coat pockets.

"Yes,Sir," she mumbled indignantly.

Auron glared obliquely at her. He hated that title.

"Did you bring Tidus here to die, too?" she asked dryly.

"Tidus made his choice," he said, but it felt like she'd driven the end of his katana into his chest. "You haven't made yours yet."

"Oh,nowI have a choice?" she scoffed. "You hurtle me into Sin's butthole andnowI have a choice?"

"You've always had a choice."

"Really?" she said ironically. "So if I asked you to take me home, would you think I was selfish because I didn't want to die?"

Auron didn't say anything.

"That's what I thought," she said.

"I recall a time you did want to die," Auron said coolly, after a few moments. "Very selfishly."

Sharply, she sipped the air. Auron kept his gaze straight ahead to avoid the hurt that was most definitely in her eyes.

"That's hitting below the belt, asshole."

"Believe me, if it was my decision, you'd still be in Zanarkand."

When they rounded the cliff, a sliver of the Travel Agency came into view and Auron felt the tug of the book from under his arm as Raine pried it free. She hugged it against her like she used to with her school texts. "I can carry a book at least."

With the eerie sagacity of two people who had spent more time with each other than anyone else in the last ten years, Auron and Raine came to a slow stop in the path, neither questioning the other about the halt. During a pregnant pause, Auron stared across the gorge, the shadows of the mountains cast long over the ice-covered lake as the chill of night advanced.

"Am Ireallythe best candidate for a Pilgrimage?" she asked, tucking her face into her coat, bracing from a flurry of loose snow. "I don't even like walking that much."

"Among other things."

"I'm having a hard time believing my brother brought me here to die. I mean, if I'm going to die for a cause, I'd like to know what it is."

"That's fair," he muttered without enthusiasm. She was right about this. There were better Summoners out there and Tidus hadn't given Auron much to go on when he tasked him with monitoring his little sister.

Zanarkand Ruins was a graveyard of old memories—including his own—projecting off stray Pyreflies, and shortly after Yuna chose Tidus as her Final Aeon, when Tidus took Auron aside, the memories began to repeat. That look of hesitancy in Tidus' desperate eyes was the same as Jecht's, and as Tidus anxiously scratched the back of his head, Auron knew what Tidus was going to ask. The cycle was repeating, replaying in front of him, spinning out of control. He had hoped for a new result, urged his comrades to get off the path he had worn down and begin hacking away a new one, but their shock and denial of Yevon's lies stunted them. Auron had changed nothing.

Raine pierced him with her blue eyes, cutting through the armor of his sunglasses like she always could, somehow able to look into the eye that wasn't there. "You can't keep secrets from me anymore. That's not what family does."

Auron looked at her wryly.

"It counts," she said defensively.

He sighed tetchily through his nose, but nodded. "I know."

"Come on, Auron. What is it? As his sister, it's up to me to avenge him? Eye for an eye and all that?"

Considering her, Auron rolled her staff back and forth across his shoulder, just as two men came out of the inn. He recognized them faintly as Guardians, but he couldn't recall their names or from whose pilgrimage they belonged to. One glanced over, quickly consulted the other, and then they both smiled at Auron and waved. Auron gave them a brisk nod and was relieved they didn't come over as they headed the opposite direction. Raine noticed the two men, but took strides to ignore them.

"Inside," Auron said, gesturing to the door.

"You can tell me now."

Auron hesitated.

She smiled cruelly, jerked her head towards the Guardians hiking away from them. "Are you afraid I'll make a scene?"

"Youareyour brother's sister," he muttered, jaw tensing. The last time he had this conversation, Tidus screamed at him on the deck of the S.S. Winno, but he knew Raine was too introverted to raise her voice in public. He peered over his glasses at her to capture her eye contact. "Let's get one thing straight. The Tidus you know is dead. You willneversee him again."