But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods,

I should be glad of another death.*

How are you, Braska? Are you still smiling?

I really wasn’t prepared for not going, you know. I thought I was, but I wasn’t. I didn’t think it would be so difficult. This not-going, I mean. Even though I knew the pain hadn’t faded. Even when the constant dull ache in me reached a sharpness, a pitch I hadn’t felt in ten years on the realisation that just up these stairs was you. Still, I didn’t think it would be so very terrible not to go. I didn’t think it would be this hard to be left behind. But it is. Oh, Braska, it is.

The others have already gone up. For all I know they’re on the Farplane already. I don’t care. I can’t make myself care, just now. The moment we stepped from the edge of Guadosalam on to the crystal pathway, the moment I realised what this meant, being here – I swear, Braska, I would have given anything to be able to go. I did not care what would happen to me if I went, an unsent mingling with the sent; I didn’t care who knew and who didn’t and who would find out if – as I almost certainly would, I couldn’t think of doing otherwise – I collapsed to my knees in front of your ghost and touched my forehead to the floor in veneration for a life snipped short. The need to see you, to stand before you and tell you everything, everything, was so painful and so strong that it almost drew me up these stairs in the wake of my rag-tag companions, straggling up in front of me, so bright and out of place. None of them needed this as much as I did, I thought wildly, selfishly. None of them knew what grief was. How could they? Children, all of them. Children, who knew nothing of real loss.

How I wanted to see you. How I needed to see you. But I pulled myself together, though my legs felt weak and my stomach heavy with disappointment; I held myself back. I watched as they all trooped up the steps. The boy lagged behind. He sent me a backwards glance that I pretended not to see. Not here, I thought, angered, irrationally, at his tactlessness. Like a shriek of mirth in a temple, it was crude and out of place. Not now.

So here I am, alone.

I say ‘alone’ out of habit, but I’m really here with Rikku, the little Al Bhed girl. Rikku has little interest in the Farplane. She says that, as a heretic – and she says it with a sardonic little smile far too old for her – it’s not for her. She and I get on better than you’d think. We’re so extremely different – poles apart – that we don’t even attempt to understand each other. It makes for a remarkably harmonious coexistence. She’s sitting up there now, on one of the big guard stones, skimming pebbles down into the abyss. She’s a sweet kid. She can sense I don’t feel like talking (I don’t, often, nowadays, you won’t be so very surprised to hear) and so she leaves me in peace, amuses herself, doesn’t make many demands. Fifteen years old, and precocious, and proud of it. She’d be your niece. I just realised that this very minute. She would be, wouldn’t she, if her father was your wife’s brother? All these family ties. What a small world. I wonder if you ever met her.

Well, here I am, in any event, sitting here on the steps feeling the cold seep into my bones. Talking to you, not even half-sure you can hear me. Well, anyway. It passes the time. Actually, I was tempted to reminisce a bit. I thought I might be, here. It seems made for reminiscing, this place. Is it all right with you if I indulge? Feel free to give me a sign if you get bored. Really. Haunt me, if you can. I can’t think of anything I’d like more.

Do you remember the time when we were sitting on the grass near the Mi’ihen inn, on that promontory, looking out across the sea? We were waiting for Jecht, I think. You remember how you looked about you, as if checking for disapproving spies, and then lay back, putting your arm in its wide sleeve across your forehead and closing your eyes, sighing with the prosaic pleasure of the soft grass and the warm sun. Absently I pulled up a weed with a bright yellow flower and a red centre. I twirled the stalk between my fingers for a minute or two. Then I leant over and tickled your nose with it. You smiled without opening your eyes and brushed me off. Then you sat up and sneezed, explosively.

‘Oh, Yevon, I knew it,’ you said, laughing, eyes beginning to water. ‘My Guardian’s conspiring to fell me with my hay fever.’ Horrified I apologised, because I had not known. You waved the apology away. ‘I wish Besaid could see this,’ you said, rubbing at your streaming eyes. ‘Their Summoner, strong in the face of fiends and Sin alike, brought to his knees by pollen.’

And then Jecht came over, stood there with his arms folded, looking down at us: you, sitting there sneezing and coughing and wiping your eyes on your sleeve; me, stricken, with guilt written all over my face. Grinning, he said: ‘Auron, I can’t believe you made Braska cry already. We haven’t even had breakfast yet. It usually takes at least until ten-thirty.’

‘Shut up,’ I said savagely. ‘You’re not helping.’

‘Good thing you came along, Jecht,’ you said, sneezing, as he stuck out his hand and helped you to your feet. ‘What with Auron conspiring with the flowers, I feared for my life.’

‘Sorry, Braska,’ I pleaded. ‘Yevon, who knew you had allergies! You should have told me!’

‘Should I have?’ You looked at Jecht, mischievously, and he shrugged and grinned back, playing along. ‘I didn’t think it was particularly important, given the other things we had to worry about.’

‘Well, it is!’ I returned hotly, embarrassed. ‘A Guardian should know all his Summoner’s weaknesses.’

‘Well, you found it,’ you said. ‘Don’t tell Sin, will you?’

‘Don’t worry, Braska,’ drawled Jecht. ‘I’ll see that the flowers don’t get ya.’

‘Thank you, Jecht,’ you said, and bowed to him. He acknowledged it with a grave nod. ‘Now I can sleep soundly.’

‘Braska, please!’ I exclaimed, taken aback by your flippancy. ‘I’m serious. I should have known.’

‘Oh, lighten up, Auron,’ said Jecht. ‘It’s not the end of the world. Yet.’

‘Not yet,’ you agreed lightly, shooting me an impish look.

‘Braska!’

You took one hazy look at my anguished expression and collapsed laughing.

See how strange it was, that warm morning in Mi’ihen. There, none of the electricity which I had felt in Besaid – when you had been so excited that even I caught it, and you, grabbing my hands, practically crackling with anticipation, childish with impatience to be finally doing something – and none of the intensity we were to share four days after Mi’ihen in the weird half-light of the Moonflow, none of the lingering glances or impulsive touches of that memorable, beautiful campsite. Moonflow. I have a still image of you, there. You, standing on the bank, just turning to look at me, not smiling yet but just about to, and your beauty and your grace and your goodness, catching at my heart like claws peeling back the hard skin of a soft fruit, leaving me open and vulnerable and breathless with love.

Just a week, seven short days later, and, unflinching at the thunder and the lightning, which was making Jecht undeniably nervous, you were greeting Rin with a firm, secular, Al Bhed handshake, talking to him fast and fluently in his own language, asking for a couple of rooms. This startled him so much he could do nothing but stare, wondering at a Summoner who spoke his language so well – until, that is, you told him about your wife. Suddenly you were instant brothers. He came round from his counter and shook your hand with both of his, embraced you and clapped you on the back, then said something which made you laugh too hard to explain to Jecht and me what it was. (‘Congratulations on marrying outside your species,’ Rin translated for our benefit, deadpan, ‘and may your children take after your wife. I jest, of course,’ he added. ‘Of course,’ Jecht muttered, exchanging with me a look that said it all). 

‘You must drink with me,’ Rin said, still beaming at having found a compatriot-in-law in the wasteland. ‘I insist.’

‘We’d be delighted,’ you said warmly.

The wine he gave us was from his own collection: Al Bhed and potent, so dark it looked like blood, so red it was almost black. Four hours later and there was Jecht, passed out on his bed, snoring fit to raise the dead in the single room. He hadn’t drunk as much as he might have done, to his credit. And in the room with the twin beds there was I, waking and finding you close on the next bed. You were on the edge of it, lying on your side, facing me, blankets kicked off. I felt off-kilter and dislocated. Unthinking, numb, I reached out and touched with my fingers the soft curve of your mouth. You opened your eyes and smiled, sleepily, reached out and caught my hand. You had slept most of it off, I think, but still, you weren’t used to alcohol, and certainly nothing as strong as what we’d had.

‘It’s hot, isn’t it, Auron,’ you said, sitting up, dishevelled, slurring your words the smallest fraction. ‘I feel awfully strange.’ You got up and then sat down abruptly beside me on my bed, apparently listening hard. ‘Can you hear the thunder? Has it stopped?’

‘No,’ I said, and laid my hand on your shoulder, drawing you round. ‘No, it hasn’t stopped.’

You looked vaguely surprised at the action. You looked at me, gently puzzled. ‘Auron?’ I watched your mouth form the word, as it had so many times before. ‘Did you want something?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

And I kissed you.

It was a blur. A haze of pleasure and guilt and gratitude. I was fingers and thumbs, clumsier because I was terrified we would be caught. You, on the other hand, were perfectly calm, with all the widower’s wisdom that was your prerogative and the added maturity you’d gathered in the three years you’d been on Spira’s earth before I had. You had never done this either, I was pretty sure of that, but you took everything in your stride. Taking things in your stride was sort of your speciality, wasn’t it? It was a point of honour, I think, that when everyone else would be scattering like headless chocobos you’d be the still, calm, steady one, secure in the backing of your twin gods, Yevon and Logic. If one failed, well, the other would catch you, wouldn’t it? Of course it would. Bring out the banners: Nothing fazes Braska! And accordingly, you seemed as happy and guiltless for that short hour as if what we were doing was perfectly expected of a Guardian and his Summoner. As if we weren’t contravening the unwritten law that forbade this, ever. As for me, I ran the gamut of emotion: I practically wept with joy when you touched me, when you murmured my name and leaned up to kiss me, even though I was so busy being terrified. Hell, I could hardly believe my luck when you didn’t simply slap me across the face and shove me off, which I half-expected.

‘Thank you,’ I remember gasping halfway through, clutching you to me, desperately, as if you might disintegrate into powder any second, leaving me with an armful of ashes. ‘Thank you – Braska –’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Auron,’ you said lightly, though you were breathing hard too. ‘What’s there to thank me for? This dance takes two.’ You kissed me gently on the mouth as you reached down and, firmly but equally gently, prised my fingers off your hips. ‘Not so hard, all right? I bruise like an apple.’ You actually smiled, into my eyes, right in the middle of this, this most serious thing, when it was taking all my concentration just to stop my brain from exploding. I marvelled at your composure, your control.

And afterwards you sat cross-legged on my bed with the sheet round your shoulders, staring out at the cloudy sky, listening to the thunder, watching the lightning spike down. You were silent. You drew your knees up and put your arms round them. You looked very young, sitting like that, with your head inclined slightly to one side. The back of your neck looked very vulnerable. I sat up, got on my knees and, hesitantly, I put my arms round your waist.

‘What am I doing?’ you said.

‘How do you mean?’ Your hair smelled nice. Clean and sweet.

‘The pilgrimage. This. Everything.’

‘I didn’t mean this to happen so – fast,’ I said. I shouldn’t have drunk so much, I thought. We none of us should have. ‘I am sorry, Braska. I am.’

‘No…’ You leant your head back against my shoulder. ‘I’m sorry. It’s not this, Auron. I didn’t mean this, exactly, just … you know.’ You sighed. ‘It is complicated.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘But remember, Braska, if you’re having any doubts – about the pilgrimage, I mean – it’s your decision. You can stop any time you want to. You don’t have to finish it. No one would think any less of you.’

‘Yes they would,’ you said quietly. ‘And I would too.’

‘Braska…’

‘It was Yuna’s birthday last week,’ you said in a non sequitur that told me you did not want to talk about it any more. ‘She’s seven now, Auron, isn’t that big?’

‘Yes.’

‘She should have got the presents I left her by now. Lulu’s mother promised they’d see to it.’

‘I’m sure she’ll have kept her word.’

‘I hope so.’

‘You don’t look like the father of a seven-year-old,’ I said.

‘I don’t feel much like one either.’ You clasped your hands together in your lap. The sheet pooled round your waist, folded itself coolly over my arm. You sighed. ‘When she was born I’d just turned twenty-one, Auron. Yevon, I was young. Practically a child myself.’

‘You don’t regret…?’

‘Oh! No,’ you said hastily. ‘No, of course not. I didn’t mean that at all. It’s just… well, I was thinking about her recently and… I feel like I’ve missed so much. The training ate up my time, and…’ You trailed off.

‘You couldn’t help that.’

‘I’d already completed the initiation when my wife told me she was pregnant,’ you went on, as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘I’d been sworn in. What could I do?’

‘Quit,’ I dared, and my chest hurt as I said the word, as if a fist had squeezed my heart and then let go, all very suddenly. ‘You could have quit. Anyone else would have, but you… You’re too stubborn for your own good.’

‘Thanks.’ You smiled wanly. ‘But I thought about quitting, Auron. Believe me. So many times I almost went to the elders and told them I couldn’t do it any more, what with my wife’s child coming and everything. But then I got to thinking about that child growing up as I had, barely allowed to play outside, with my mother terrified and crying all the time and the prophets telling everyone the world was ending all over again, and I thought –’ You took a breath and continued, determinedly, though your voice wobbled. ‘ – I thought: I won’t let my child grow up scared. So I went on. But I missed so much, Auron, when Yuna was a baby, and then suddenly she wasn’t a baby any more – and then her mother died, and I wanted to quit all over again, but Yevon had chosen me for this, and I’d come so far … and I just couldn’t.’ You stopped and dropped your head, and your voice was practically nonexistent. ‘What if she hates me, Auron?’

‘She won’t,’ I said, horrified on your behalf at the very idea. ‘How could she?’ 

‘Well, she has her reasons,’ you said, and laughed, shakily. ‘First her mother passes on, and then her father leaves her – voluntarily, no less. She’ll be an orphan, Auron, and I’m going to – to miss so much more, y-you know? I never even made it up to her when I forgot things or missed important dates or – or –’

‘She won’t remember that,’ I said. ‘She won’t remember anything except how much she loves you.’

‘Oh, Yevon, I just don’t know!’ you exploded, balling your fists. You rounded on me, almost angry. ‘Is this the right thing to do?’ you demanded. ‘Is it worth hurting her so much when there’s the very real possibility I might fail?’

‘You won’t fail,’ I said, though it tore me in two, straight down the middle, to have to reassure you of that, when your success meant that thing too awful to even comprehend. ‘You won’t fail, Braska. Not you.’ 

‘You don’t know that.’ Your fists unclenched and you clasped your hands tight in your lap. You looked at me. Your eyes seemed larger than usual, and clear as the Moonflow itself. ‘I’m scared, Auron,’ you said quietly. ‘I’m so scared sometimes I can barely think. It’s selfish of me to be so frightened. It’s awful. I’m meant to have a pure heart and a blameless spirit, and yet I’m so scared of Sin I can hardly bear to think about it. You know I’m meant to be doing this pilgrimage without fear, ever. I’m not right for this, Auron; I know I’m not good enough. What happens if I fail? What happens if I fail and I’m killed anyway? It’ll have been for nothing, it – it – and Yuna – she – it – oh, Yevon help me I can’t.’ You burst into tears: angry, choked sobs. You were still kneeling; you bent your head almost to your knees and covered your face with your hands and wept, silently now, as if you were worried that someone might hear over Jecht’s regular snoring, which shook the whole inn. I had never seen you cry before. The dying, hiccupping sound struck the same kind of superstitious fear in me as did the distant low chord of a funeral march. If you were crying – you, still, calm, steady Braska, who, if the world ended tomorrow and the sun went out as if Yevon had pinched it out between finger and thumb, would be the one with the flint in his pocket – then what hope was there for the rest of us? For me?

‘The worst thing is that she thinks I’m coming back,’ you said, calming yourself with a visible effort as I wiped your eyes gently with the back of my hand. ‘Because no one told her I wasn’t. Oh, I’m being so stupid. Yevon knows I had all this out with myself a thousand times before I made my decision. If she can grow up without Sin, then it will all be worth it.’ You rubbed your eyes, raised your head and gave a watery smile. ‘Well, in any event, we had better get some sleep. I feel horrible. How do I look?’

‘Brave,’ I said softly, my throat tight, cupping your cheek. ‘Stubborn.’

After you were taken – I don’t know why I insist on the euphemism; you’d think I could stand to say killed after ten years, but there you are – immediately after the fight, I mean, I was inconsolable. It was the kind of grief that makes a man temporarily insane. I could not believe you were gone, could not make my brain accept the fact. I had bent my mind so far round to avoid the sentence Braska is dead that I could not bend it back again. My senses were all over the place. My mind was scattered, and this frightened me, because I had always been so collected. Brother Auron is so level-headed. Yes, but Brother Auron also fell in love with his Summoner – and never looked back. Brother Auron no longer existed.

Outwardly, I’m sure I looked fine. I’m sure people even thought I was cold, this guardian making the long journey back to Bevelle sans Summoner, and not even the slightest hint of emotion: neither gladness for Sin’s defeat nor sadness for my personal loss. I waited four days and four nights after you and Jecht were gone before I could express my grief. I found myself back at the thunder plains; the never-ending storm was nothing compared to the maelstrom of pain and rage and guilt in me. I accepted Rin’s gracious sympathy and then escaped outside, sat outside against the back wall of the inn. It was ten o’ clock at night and the sky was black as tar. The rain fell in bursts, like the lightning itself. I did not care if I were struck. I half hoped I would be. Just to see what would happen, you understand. I did not know if I was properly alive; I felt alive enough, but who knew? Perhaps my heart wasn’t beating. Perhaps I was really an animated corpse. If that were the case, then I was a freakish example of a zombie. Because dead men don’t cry, as a rule.

I sat there for maybe fifteen minutes, just me and my thoughts and the hot tears that it hurt me to shed and the distant booming thunder of the ceaseless storm for company. Alone again, I thought, awash with self-pity, and the tears came harder. I wept, silently, until my throat was constricted and my eyes burned. And it was not helping. I did not feel consoled. Actually, I felt vaguely sick. Allowing myself all this emotion was like overeating after starving for years. My body couldn’t deal with it. So I wiped my sleeve across my face and forced myself to stop, physically made myself stop. If I was dead I had better start acting like it, I told myself fiercely. There would be nothing that could get to me after this. Every time something came along to wound me in the future I would remember this, and that other would dwindle into insignificance.

Sensing someone, I looked up, defensive. There he was, standing there, already soaked to the skin. Rin.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said gently. ‘I must ask that you come inside. It is dangerous.’

‘Thanks,’ I muttered. ‘You shouldn’t have bothered.’

‘Of course I should.’ He came forward a few steps. ‘Sir Auron,’ he said heavily in his pleasant, lilting voice, ‘I am sorry for your loss.’

I knew exactly what he was talking about: there was no need for him to clarify. ‘Thank you,’ I managed to reply. ‘But you’ve said this already, Rin.’

‘Yes, but I reiterate. I do not want you to think it was merely platitudes.’ The rain was soaking his fair hair, plastering it against his forehead. His green eyes looked into me and in them there was real sympathy. ‘I realise I am hardly in a position to say this, but I know Lord Braska was a good man. I knew him so briefly, and yet I liked him so well in that time. He was the bravest, most good-humoured man of Yevon I ever –’ 

‘Don’t,’ I said tightly, so low that he stopped immediately. The past tense he had used slammed into my brain like a knife. To me you were still an is, to everyone else, a was. ‘Please. Don’t.’

‘I apologise,’ he said, after a moment’s silence. ‘But I ask you again, Sir Auron. Come inside. It is not safe.’

‘Leave me alone, please, Rin.’ I rested my head in my hands. The rain dripped off the roof of the inn and into my hair, into my collar. It was as warm as tears. Even the sky cried for you, Braska.

‘That I cannot do,’ said Rin. ‘It is not common, but the lightning has been known to strike very close by. The conductors are not foolproof. You are my guest, and I cannot allow you to endanger yourself while on my premises.’

‘Then I won’t stay on them.’ I stood up. I didn’t care. I would walk all night, and woe betide anything that tried to halt me in my path. ‘I’ve paid for the room.’

I collected my belongings from the small bedroom and brought them into the smaller lobby. He pleaded with me to stay, obviously worried for my well-being, if not, tacitly, for my sanity. But I would not listen. I walked all night, back through the thunder plains, into the dark green paths and twitching shadows of Macalania. And it was strange, Braska. Nothing dared attack me. No fiend, no thief, no desperate man. Nothing. In my grief I was untouchable. I was an unsent, and it was as if the fiends themselves cringed from me in my wrongness.

After we three were dead I rode Sin. I went to Zanarkand – that big, guiltless city, high and hubristic, a startling counterpoint to the sad pile of rubble that was our Zanarkand  – to fulfil that promise I made to Jecht. I went to find his son.

A child, he was then. Seven years old, just as Yuna would have been. I remember standing there, staring at him, as the sea whispered and sighed around us, at a total loss. Now that I was here, now that the adrenaline and the drive it had taken actually getting here had worn off, I realised I had no idea how to bring up a child. Because that was what I was going to have to do. Bring him up. Look after him. Nothing paternal stirred in me. My gut instinct was to turn and run for the hills.

A promise to a dead man, however, is still a promise. A promise by a dead man, for that matter. Everything I knew – you, my own body, my faith, and to all intents and purposes, Jecht – was dead. And this boy, amidst it all, boisterous with life. And it was I who had to take care of him. I would have laughed, were I not so utterly horrified.  

This is stupid, talking to you of unremarkable things. It’s even more stupid, here, now, with you so close, with your spirit nearer to me than ever before. Why have I to tell you about you? Why have I to inform you of us? You were there. This is self-indulgence at its most selfish. This is guilt. And am I not the master of that? Don’t look so anxious, Auron, you said once, white-faced, having just come round from a particularly bad-tempered malboro’s lashing. It wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t have – ow, Jecht! – done anything. Could you?

Probably not. But I should have tried. I should have done something.

I know. Before I get to what I want to discuss with you, I’ll tell you a bit about your daughter. She might be talking to you herself this very moment, but no matter. Your daughter wears the same fearless face as you did, you know. Those extraordinary mismatched eyes you told me about have taken on a glint like rock crystal. She narrows them often nowadays, as if permanently squinting into the sun. She, all grown up at seventeen, fights in the front line alongside me and the boy and the rest. You would be awfully proud of her. She is sweet and self-effacing and of course, of course I see you in her lovely face every time I look at her and it hurts afresh each time, a sharp finger poking at the wound. She is like you in many ways. She beams every time I mention the resemblance, to your credit.

Jecht’s son – I didn’t want to talk about him now but I suppose I must – scowls when I inform him of his resemblance, denying it, striving ever harder not to emulate the man he never really knew while growing more like him with every passing day. Sometimes he’ll sink briefly into a kind of pensive gloom, sitting apart from everyone with his chin in his hands and his eyes staring into nothing. Yuna usually manages to cajole him out of it, with typical sweet humour, and usually he smiles at her.

I’m no good at these things, as you know. The younger generation is as much a mystery to me as we were to our elders. Still, even I can see what’s happening. I think she has grown overly fond of the boy. That’s too dry, even for me: let me rephrase it. I think she is falling in love with him. There, now that’s too melodramatic. Well, I can’t get it exactly right, but it’s something in between the two. Companionship with an edge, perhaps, would be a better way to describe what they have at the moment. Friendship-plus. They are awkward together, anyway, and from personal experience I think that’s a sure enough indicator that something will happen, sooner or later.

He is not good enough for her, in my opinion. But then, who is? Who is good enough for High Summoner Braska’s only child? I feel like shielding her from him, standing in front of her with my arms spread wide, asking him: Do you know who she is? Do you know who made her? I judge him with your eyes; I contrast your quiet gravity with his puppyish optimism, and it’s apples and oranges, certainly, you were much older than he is and who knows, he might mature, but here, now, he’s lacking. He’s fickle as a promise, fragile as an egg. With a cruel word (You are not enough, you will never be clever, good, honest, remarkable enough; deep down, behind the good looks, you are ordinary, and she will find out, she will find out) I could put a wide hole straight through him. A woman marries her father, Braska, or so I’ve heard. She finds a man as close to her first male role model as she can. In Tidus, Yuna has disproved the theory. He is not you. Not by a long, long way. Not at all. I judge him with your eyes, and he falls short every time.

I haven’t been to temple in years, Braska, but what I want – what I really want – is to confess. You might have guessed that. There’s something I need to get off my chest, you see. There’s something you have to know. I couldn’t tell this to any priest. No priest worth his salt, with any moral scruples whatsoever, would listen to this.

I said Jecht’s son was not good enough for your daughter, Braska. I never claimed he wasn’t good enough full stop. That would have been unfair, as well as untrue. And it would have made me the worst kind of hypocrite. Because, in my infinite slipperiness, I never said he wasn’t good enough for me. 

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