In the fading evening light, before the street lights triggered, Auron waited idle on the front stoop, surveying the local children as they played freeze-tag in the street. Across the road, one of the neighbors was watering his garden and another neighbor was at her mailbox, sorting through magazines and bills. Limping down the sidewalk in front of the house, an old man with his grey-muzzled dog raised his hand in amiable greeting and Auron nodded back, wishing Raine would hurry up.
Behind him, the door finally unlatched and Auron faced Raine. She was still in her cheerleading uniform as she summoned him inside. "They said it was okay."
"You said they wouldn't mind," Auron said.
"They don't," she said with a simper. "I asked them."
Auron braced himself and stepped over the threshold, into the entryway of the split-level home belonging to Raine's great aunt and uncle, the first time he had been inside. It was humid and smelled of roasting meat. The game was on upstairs and it was intermingled with the general sounds of cooking: running water, a spoon beating the side of a sauce pan and the heavy, muffled boil of something thick. Downstairs was dark, below ground and faintly dank.
"You can take your boots off here," Raine said, pointing down to the rug with a pile of shoes in an array of sizes. Her sneakers were already at the top of the pile.
Auron didn't usually like taking his boots off for any reason so that he was always battle ready, but he doubted a fiend would come tearing through sleepy C-South. Leaning his katana on the wall next to a brass coat rack, he bent down to loosen the laces, then propped against the door to kick off his boots. Considering his gauntlet for a moment, he snapped it off and hung it from one of the coat rack's hooks.
"Can I take your coat?" she asked eagerly.
"No. Thanks."
Her eyes were dancing. "Do you want to see my room?"
"I've seen it."
"From the inside?"
Auron hesitated, wondering the harm in humoring her, but was instantly suspicious of his own judgment to be alone with her in her room. Most likely it was to prolong the inevitable first meeting of her aunt and uncle.
"I'm going to show Auron my room," Raine called up the stairs.
Auron shook his head, disapproving, but she just smiled at him. What made Raine believe her aunt would think that was anything but a bad idea?
"I'll call you when dinner's ready," the older woman answered and Auron glared up the steps at someone invisible.
"Come on," Raine said.
She grabbed his hand, flicked on the downstairs light, and Auron's head whipped sideways from the combination of her sharp tug and his reluctance to follow. At the foot of the stairs, they maneuvered through a cramped family room, between dusty boxes and mismatched furniture. Raine brought him to a dim hallway with a few doors, dropping his hand as she disappeared into the first dark room on the right.
Auron stood blind in the doorway while she shuffled around the familiar room and a click later, she was bent by the lamp next her unmade bed. She snatched up a few intimate items off the floor on her way to her cluttered desk where she turned on another lamp. Auron drifted in slowly. Her bedroom smelled so sweet it was almost dizzying and he noticed a molten cluster of scented candles on top of her dresser, next to several boxes of matches. Her walls were a collage of posters, mostly punk bands, kittens and a diagram of a water molecule behind her door, but Auron halted his attention on the poster over her headboard: the center for the Zanarkand Duggles, half-nude and dripping wet.
"That's for appearances," Raine explained, while she inconspicuously shoved the dirty underwear from the floor into the top desk drawer. "I'm a Duggle now. You can thank peer pressure for that."
"Hmph."
"So what do you think?"
Auron nodded listlessly at the rest of the room. "It looks suitable."
"Oh, I want to show you something," she said. She kneeled by her bed, lifting the dust ruffle to rummage underneath. Her short little umbrella skirt hiked up, revealing a sliver of white underwear and his shoulders shook in silent chuckle at the print of red hearts. He was looking at the undergarment of a girl, but his eye meandered a little too long at the milky white thighs of a woman. Darkening, Auron spun around to face the mirror over her dresser, quietly chastising himself.
For distraction, he glanced over the photos tucked into the frame of her mirror, group photos of her friends, of the other cheerleaders, a couple old pictures with her brother Tidus and some older ones of her mother and father, discolored and worn, as if folded many times. Jecht's arm draped coolly over his wife's reedy shoulders and his face was rounder and more clean-shaven than when Auron knew him on the pilgrimage to defeat Sin. Jecht and Tidus were both gone now and it was up to Auron to be guardian to the final living member of Jecht's family, Raine. Tidus made Auron promise before yielding as Yuna's Final Aeon.
Moving on, Auron's focus wandered over to the picture of Raine with Jory, captured in a spontaneous pose when Raine had jumped on Jory's back and he was carrying her piggy-back for the camera.
How sweet, Auron thought with a deep glare. Brainy Rainy and the boy she was having sex with.
Where did the time go? It felt like just yesterday she was reprimanding him for stepping on sidewalk cracks, frantically upset about the condition of his mother's back. Today, he was having demonstrative fantasies of her in her cheerleading uniform.
"Here they are," Raine said behind him. She had three white tubes, all different lengths, and when she handed him one, he realized it was a rolled up poster.
"What are these?"
"Tidus' old prints."
Auron snapped off the rubber band and unrolled it partway. It was a group photo of Tidus' old team, the Zanarkand Abes, signed by all the players in black permanent marker.
"Those are actually all their signatures. It's actually worth a lot." She handed him another one and Auron traded her.
"Why don't you hang them on your wall?" Auron asked rolling off another rubber band.
Her grimace was loosely disgusted. "I used to, but they made me uncomfortable, so I took them down."
"Uncomfortable?"
"His bedroom eyes freak me out."
Auron unrolled the poster and realized what she was talking about. The second picture was a close-up of Tidus, the lighting filtered and dreamy, and he was as undressed as his Duggle equivalent over Raine's bed, with a very unbrotherly look on his face. Auron smirked and rolled the poster back up. "I see."
He wasn't particularly interested the last one, but she had worked so hard to find them under her bed. It was an action shot they used to sell at the stadium vendors.
"I've been trying to find some of my father, but those are a little harder to find."
When she replaced the rubber bands on them all, she tossed them on her desk, then bounced on her bed and leaned back on her hands, crossing her legs by the ankles. Their eyes met for an instant before skimming to other parts of the room. He was becoming delirious from the suffocating scents of all those candles and the air vibrated as their separate chemicals mingled in the space between them, agitating in an unstable reaction.
"Dinner!"
Aunt Naya's supper call startled them both. Auron nudged himself away from the desk and waited to follow her upstairs. She got up with a vaguely irritated look on her face, but it didn't seem completely directed at him. The air outside her bedroom was noticeably cooler.
Raine stopped at the landing by the front door, where his katana was still leaned up against the wall, and inclined conspiratorially towards him. "Whatever you do, don't mention anything about the Duggles' losing streak. It will set off my uncle."
"I'll try to hold back," Auron said blandly and mounted the stairs two at a time after her.
Straight ahead on the main floor, the dining table had four settings and in the steamy kitchen, Raine's aunt Naya was reaching into one of the cupboards for a stack of four plates. She spun around, her smile genuine and beaming until her eyes rested on Auron. He tried not to notice as the woman's expression swiftly altered into something phony and remotely maniacal.
"Aunt Naya, this is Auron," Raine introduced, apparently oblivious to the immediate shift in her aunt's nature.
"Hello Auron," the older woman said stiffly, glancing with aggravation into the living room, where her husband was busy with the game. From where Auron stood, Raine's uncle was just a helmet of white hair over the back of his rocking armchair.
Auron's head bobbed once in respect. "Good evening." He stopped himself before he called her "ma'am." She couldn't be that many years older than him.
A wild grin still pasted on her face, Aunt Naya stared intensely into the living room. "Cete, come meet Raine's friend."
"In a min—dammit! Get him!"
Every one of Auron's muscles seized, until he foolishly realized Uncle Cetan was screaming at the screen, swelling with cheers. Cetan was sitting forward in his chair, hostile from an undesirable turn-around in the game.
There was an uncomfortable moment as the three of them stood looking at each other, and eventually Aunt Naya gestured toward the table. "Auron, why don't you have a seat?"
Raine dragged out one of the chairs. "Sit here. This is where I usually eat," she said and skipped to the chair opposite him, against the wall.
Slowly sitting, Auron was content to wait for the elder man, but Aunt Naya lifted a bowl of mashed potatoes and handed it to Auron. "Why don't you get us started?"
Auron let his cloak sleeve fall back so he could hold the bowl with both hands and flopped a generous spoonful onto his plate, passing it across the table to Raine, who was eying his uncovered arm with a deep blush as she flicked open her napkin and laid it on her lap.
"Son of a—" Uncle Cetan muttered from the living room, as the horn on the television announced the final score. Auron assumed the Duggles had lost, one game of many, apparently. Hastily scooting in his chair, Auron gave the patriarch room to stomp by. At the head of the table, across from Raine's aunt, Uncle Cetan whipped his chair out and slumped into his seat, grumbling something about a worthless defense and Auron got his first real look at Uncle Cetan. His hair was not all white, as he previously thought, but marbled black and gray, deep grooves frowning around his eyes and forehead as he offered Auron a curt nod and reached for the mashed potatoes.
"You look familiar, Auron," Aunt Naya said. "Do I know your parents?"
Auron opened his mouth, but Raine spoke up. "Auron's an orphan, Aunt Naya."
"Over at St. Dolam's?" Uncle Cetan asked, jutting his thumb, apparently in the direction of St. Dolam's.
A local orphanage, Auron assumed.
"Bevelle, actually," Raine said, lips twitching as she met Auron's eye. Auron slanted his head formidably at her, but she was unruffled at his reproach, almost giddy, her eyes bright and gleaming with mischief. Raine waved her fork in the air and seemed to dot an imaginary "i" with it as she pointed slightly to Auron's right. Aunt Naya was holding a bowl of buttered peas in Auron's blind spot.
Cetan reached across the table to spear a few slabs of roast. "Never heard of it."
Auron spilled a handful of peas onto his plate, passed the bowl to Uncle Cetan and as he hooked a thumb over the edge of the bowl, and provided Auron with an intense double take, initially fixated with Auron's scar until he shot his wife a quizzical look.
