Everything Looks Better Ch. 12

Raine kissed Auron back, realizing it might be their last, but when he started to lead her to the bed, she had to stop him. "Tonight then?"

"Um, yes. Tonight."

He tilted his head at her. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine," she said, forcing a smile. It was a last minute decision not to tell him. She wasn't sure what he would do if he knew the Fayth had been there and she didn't want him to scare the kids.

"You're trembling," he observed.

Cinching her robe tight, Raine said, "That's what kissing you does to me."

Auron snorted. "Maybe once. Before the girls."

A wave of guilty sadness came over her. After numerous interruptions, it was easy to allow things to get routine when they had to forego creativity for efficiency. "I will always love kissing you."

"Ok," Auron said with a bemused smile.

"Will you have breakfast with us?"

He shook his head dismissively. "I'm not hungry."

"Please," Raine said. "Have breakfast with your daughters."

This time, Auron frowned. "Are you sure you're okay?"

"Everything's fine. Will you?"

"I'll be out in a minute. I'm going to jump in the shower."

Raine hesitated. "Okay. Just hurry." His look was downright suspicious, but Raine didn't want to waste any more time worrying about how much time they had. "The girls have to get to school."

"I'll be hasty."

In the galley kitchen, Willow and Basil were sitting at the peninsula island with bowls of cold cereal and juice. Willow had an open school text next to her as she finished up her arithmetic homework. She had been named for the Willow Tree City Park in C-South and so far she had never asked why. Raine once queried Auron on when they should tell Willow she had been conceived on a city lot, to which Auron sternly replied, "Never." That evening hadn't been their first time acting out Auron's fantasy on the swings, while Raine sported her old cheerleading uniform, but it had been the first time night patrol caught them and chased them away.

Basil, who was almost named Tidus until Auron lost the gender-guess, was wearing a pair of old sunglasses her father had bequeathed to her, the reflective lenses very large and dark against her small pale face. Naturally, Auron had been hoping for a boy on their second round, which was evident to Raine by his friendly rivalry and his fake ideals about "evening out the household," but Raine knew he was leery about a house full of girls: Raine and girls like Raine. But when they got Basil instead, Auron never looked back. Raine would tell him he was being punished for being mean to her when she was a kid and Auron would only playfully complain about it. Basil clearly took after him, so much more composed and aloof than her older sister, Willow, who took after Raine, deviously crafty and cared far too much what others thought of her. The girls got their good qualities and an equal amount of bad, too.

At the sight of her children, Raine was hit in the stomach with a sack of rocks as she understood the girls would always be this age and a swoop of inner hysteria nearly gave her away. She tried to appear ordinary as she circled around the counter and kissed both girls on the tops of their heads. Basil, the younger one, was too reclusive to acknowledge the affection and Willow was too preoccupied with her studies.

Willow looked up, chewing on the end of her pencil, taking the challenges of second grade very seriously. "Can you help me? I can't get this last problem."

Raine reached over and closed the book. "Finish it later. I forgot to tell you, no school today."

Willow gasped, slapping her hand over her mouth. Basil was sipping juice from a glass with both hands and smiled simply at Raine with a pulpy, orange mustache.

"Do we get to spend the day with Daddy?" Willow asked.

"And me, too."

"Don't you have watch Blitzball?" Willow asked.

"I'm not going in today."

Willow gasped again at Basil and Basil merely mimed a gasp without actually making a sound.

"Can we go swimming?" Willow squealed.

Looking up suddenly, Basil's eyebrows were up, quietly ecstatic with her sister's idea as she hung in suspense of Raine's answer.

Raine suppressed a smile. She had tried to teach Auron to swim, but he was much too interested in tugging on the strings of her bikini. "We should find something the four of us can do. You know your dad doesn't like the water."

"He can dip his feet in and play lifeguardian!" Willow cried, hardly able to contain herself in her chair.

Basil nodded enthusiastically.

Both girls were different, but the one thing they could agree on was swimming and Blitzball. They weren't anyone if they weren't their Uncle Tidus' nieces and Raine could tell it annoyed Auron. Between Tidus and Raine, he'd already spent the majority of his Zanarkand life in a Blitzball arena, and it was clear there would be more Blitzball in his future. At least, there would have been.

"We'll see. Finish your cereal."

They ate quickly, Willow giggling, Basil smiling and Raine receded to the back of the kitchen to watch them, soaking in every detail of the morning meal, the pajamas they were wearing, the way their blonde hair was shaped like their pillows, knowing it was the last time they would be together like this.

Thankfully, Aunt Naya was able to meet both girls before passing away two years ago, although she could never keep them straight, especially near the end. "No, Auntie Naya, I'm Willow. That's Basil!" their oldest would proclaim with an exasperated sigh. Aunt Naya would make up for it by bringing out a plate of cookies, which made both girls light up and look to Auron for permission, who would raise one finger, both eyebrows and emphatically mouth, "One."

Auron scowled at the word disciplinarian when Raine used it. "Structured," he offered instead. One time, he asked, "You don't remember that night you and Tidus hid in the closet?"

Of course she remembered. She had nearly pissed her underpants when Auron yelled and it was like a completely different man had opened the closet door that night. But Raine was in her seventh month of her first pregnancy when he brought it up and she wasn't about to throw Auron off his parenting game at this point.

"No," Raine had said and relief poured out of Auron's eye. It was at that moment Raine realized why Auron used to wear those sunglasses all the time, with his naked eye always betraying him. She knew she had been right to lie. Was that all marriage was? Walking through a field of carefully placed lies that would blow up if stepped on? "Why? What happened?"

He had cleared his throat and said, "You got me good."

Realizing the girls were almost done eating, Raine wondered what was taking Auron so long. She should have insisted he skip his shower. How much time did they have left? Minutes? An hour? A couple days? And how would it happen when the Fayth stopped dreaming? When her dreams ended, they just winked out, and only the important ones were remembered. And what about Auron? He wasn't a dream at all. Would he wander around Spira forever as an unsent, or would he find a Summoner to send him? Raine never stopped having nightmares of coming home from work to a puddle of Pyreflies on the houseboat floor, the Farplane somehow taking back what belonged to it. After the girls were born, the nightmares ramped up again, only this time she would come home to her daughters bawling over the same puddle.

"Daddy!" Willow cried when she saw Auron round the corner, his hair wet and combed back.

Auron slowed to a stroll and stopped by Basil, who smiled coyly under her father's scrutiny as he lifted her chin with a finger to examine her in his sunglasses.

"Hmph," he said around a smirk.

It meant: You are so adorable.

Raine had taken the liberty of buying her husband a few changes of pants (although she never could change his mind about underwear) and today he was wearing a light brown pair of carpenter trousers. But Auron wouldn't be Auron without his leather cuirass, so he was always battle-ready, in case of surprise Sinspawn. The sleeve of his cloak was also now functional with the cuffs clasped together, and Raine suspected that was so he was always hug-ready, in case of surprise Raine-spawn.

Auron had been very honest with the girls when they asked questions about his armor and sword. If he couldn't be himself around his own children, when could he? He told them stories about being a warrior monk, but Auron was rather selective when talking about his pilgrimages, as they had both agreed they wouldn't ever talk about Sin. They refused to let their daughters live with that kind of fear. More lies for the sake of happiness. But Auron would still tell them stories about their uncle and their grandfather, including one about Jecht and something called a shoopuff, which her father had mistaken for a fiend. The shoopuff ended up the star of the story because of the hilarity of its name.

The girls regarded their father's missing eye with healthy curiosity. Basil had gone through a phase of taping her eye down, adding another piece every time the previous one lost its adhesive, until her preschool teacher began to ask questions, at which time the entire contraption had to come off, but not without a couple eyelashes attached to it. Either the girls never seemed to remember how Auron lost his eye or they didn't quite think he was being truthful, because they asked about it several times. The first couple times, Auron looked at them very soberly and said, "Your mother got angry with me and stabbed me with a fork." Both girls would gasp in horror and treat Raine with fearful reverence for the rest of the day. The third time Auron told them that story, Raine waited until they were in private before slapping the chest of his armor.

"Don't tell them that," she had said.

Auron darkened and said, "Would you rather I told them the truth?"

"Of course not," Raine said, genuinely surprised. "I only meant you make me sound like the bad guy."

The very next time the girls asked, Auron sat down and placed one on each knee and said, "The first time I saw your mother, I thought she was so beautiful, I had to remove my own eye so I could function." Then he smirked at Raine and Raine rolled her eyes, knowing one day the girls would put two and two together and realize the first time their father met their mother, their mother had only been 5. Both girls had similar reactions; they were less horrified, but more repulsed as Willow had screamed, "Ew!" and Basil had scrunched her nose like someone had left out a dirty diaper.

"Daddy, there's no school today!" Willow announced.

To Raine, Auron affected surprised with a slight lift of his brows. "There isn't?"

"We're going swimming!"

Auron's eyebrows escalated higher. "We are?"

"I thought it would be nice," Raine said.

"What about work?" Auron asked, lowering his voice as he approached her at the counter. He reached over her head to the cupboard behind her for two glasses. "Big game today."

"They'll manage without me."

He glanced down at her without expression and carried the glasses to the peninsula where the juice was. Raine knew she was a bad liar and Auron know it too. She had to tell him. Whatever was going to happen, where ever they would end up, she couldn't have her bad lying be his last impression of her.

Bringing over two glasses of juice, Auron handed her one and placed the back of his fingers on her cheek. "Feeling okay?"

"I'm fine," she said, keeping the squeak out of her tone. "Listen—"

But Auron had his glass raised to her and Raine had to oblige.

Clink...toast...

*

...sip.

Auron touched the glass to his lips, but when he looked down at his hand, the glass was gone. Raine was gone, the girls were gone. In front of him a thundercloud was marbled grey and black and somewhere in his peripheral, a flicker of lightning. Suspended momentarily, Auron's belly made an awful dive, his arms and legs flailing to find footing.

He was falling.

Like a red bullet in a dismal landscape, Auron dropped out of the sky and into the sea with a grand splash of steely water. Experiencing a different kind of flail, Auron thrashed underwater, struggling to surface, greedily gulping oxygen when the air kissed his face. He bobbed around the stagnant water like an abandoned red fishing lure and with an ungainly twist, managed to rotate around to the dilapidated stone building, veiled in mist, half submerged in the sea, the different wings of the structure like small island ruins.

Baaj Temple.

So the rumors were true. The dream had been here all along, where no self-respecting Yevonite would dare use machina propelled transportation to get there.

Plotting a course to the nearest land mass, Auron slanted back into the water and kicked, swimming the only way Raine could teach him; ironically, the dead man's float. Auron climbed up the wreckage, dragging himself sideways on his elbow, scaling up the incline of a stone roof towards the crumbling remains of a round turret. He flopped on his back, breathing hard. What now? He certainly couldn't float his way out of here who and knew when the next Al Behd ship would come through. He mentally ticked off his options, struggling to ignore the oncoming hollow ache where his heart usually was, the void sapping him from the inside, telling him the dream was over.

Fathering children had never been Auron's objective, not when he was alive, not even when he had been promised to the high priest's daughter. When Raine announced her pregnancy, her initial dissonance had been aimed at him, not his developing progeny, and she had been shocked he would even question her keeping it. For some reason, she regarded his unborn child as a rare treasure. He had started out merely compliant with the pregnancy, but as her belly swelled, so did his heart for whatever was growing inside. He had not been completely sure what they would get. After all, little was known about the breeding of dreams and unsents.

In fatherhood, Auron discovered it was not that much different than being a Guardian, although Raine had much to teach him about letting go, especially when Willow started school. Good Guardians didn't let go. It was completely natural for him to want to follow her, watch her through the fence and walk her home when the day was over, but Raine explained that was unacceptable.

"She needs to learn independence," his wife had said.

"It's not enough."

"It is. It's enough for her to know you'll be waiting at home."

In time, Auron learned what an amazing mother she was, although he was not in favor of Raine's parenting style at first. He had been raised in a strict monastery, where his hands had been inspected for every meal and he couldn't leave his room in the morning until he had made his bed well enough to impress the high priest. But he held his tongue, even as he watched his daughters play in the dirt at the park, their clothes and faces filthy, while Raine would just laugh and point at a patch of clean skin and tell them they hadn't played hard enough yet. She tried to convince him good parenting often began with dirty children, but Auron had dreadful flashbacks of an unkempt Raine because her own mother was too miserable to properly parent.

Auron's opinion of his wife had changed the night of Aunt Naya's funeral. The day had gone a little differently than Uncle Cetan's funeral, mostly because he had busied himself with minding the girls while Raine tended to family matters. It seemed a man trying to entertain two bored little girls was a little less unapproachable and he gained the sympathy of most of Raine's extended family. He couldn't count how many times he had said their names and ages, evincing polite surprise when they gushed how much like their mother they looked.

At the end of the day, Auron carried the sleeping girls to their respective bedrooms and tucked them in, then joined Raine under the covers, spooning her close. He knew what Raine needed. He had done this before when her uncle died and it seemed to work. Stroking her hair and her back, he decided to confide in her what Aunt Naya had told him the day of her first wedding with Jory, discerning it would make a nice memory for Raine. She should know how her Aunt Naya thought she was strong like her father and loved like her mother.

Raine rolled over in bed to face him. "Aunt Naya said that?"

"Hmmm," he murmured.

Raine scowled and turned back to her pillow. "That's not true."

Auron was taken aback. "Why not?" He didn't understand her discord. Her mother loved Jecht utterly and not a day went by when Auron didn't feel loved by Raine. Even on days they fought she always welcomed him back with liberal apologies, a face full of kisses, and sometimes a new sex position.

"My father was weak. He treated my mom like arm-candy and because of that I never felt any love from her."

She was right, of course. Her mother loved Jecht in an obsessive, fanatical way that left no room for anyone else, but Raine's love had the ability to grow and evolve with the addition of each daughter. Her mother's incompetence was because she had spent the majority of the morning moping in bed. If Raine forgot the girls' baths, it was because she lost track of time playing games with them, and if she had them wear the same clothes two days in a row, it was because she planned on teaching the girls how to make sand castles in the park play-box. And Auron would sit nearby on a bench to watch, recalling how Raine once patted his knee, the quiet desperation of a little girl whose mother paid little attention and whose brother was too busy being guided by his new mentor, and asked if he had any children she could play with. Every time it struck him he finally did have children for her to play with, his throat would get scratchy and tight and he swore a piece of sand had gotten into his eye.

Thinking of it now, Auron's face contorted with anguish and he could feel the dry sob rising. It came out as a miserable howl and the return echo was like the chilling, haunted cry of a far-off fiend. At first, it felt like his organs were tearing, but then something jarred inside him and released. Stunned, his breath snagged in his vocal cords and his mouth fell open, one bleary eye wandering its gaze to the stormy sky.

It's finally happening, Auron thought, as the first of many Pyreflies drifted from his body. They wafted without direction into the fog, glints of color peeking through the gloom. Soon, more appeared, shooting an abortive leak, like bubbles blown forcibly from a wand. Through a murky layer of hot tears, he watched them go, a great eddy of pink and green orbs twisting into the flickering welkin.

Auron found great relief in his self-sending. His unsent life had been longer than his living life, and in some ways, more rewarding, and while he didn't belong in the Zanarkand dream world, he didn't belong in Spira, either.

Auron was ready to go.

*

Raine knew it. She knew it and she didn't tell me.

He couldn't be angry at her. Regretting he didn't get one more chance to hold his daughters and kiss his wife, Auron knew Raine did it to avoid frightening the girls and so he could enjoy the last few moments he had with his family. This he could understand. How much had he hidden from Raine in order for her to enjoy life without burden?

Reassembling in the Farplane, Auron was immersed in an endless cream haze, so thick he could barely see the tops of his boots. In his first few steps, the ground felt uneven, like a rocky plain, but still routable at least. There was nothing to do but walk, the thinning and thickening of the fog impulsive and arbitrary, and Auron marveled at the borealis of teals and turquoises streaking the sky, but the silence in the Farplane was deafening, without even the pulse of his circulation to keep him company. He tried to keep his mind busy, sensing the eternal peace would drive him mad before long.