Author's Note: Title comes from the song "Mykonos" by Fleet Foxes. Written for Challenge 7.02, "Villain Fic", at ff_land over on Dreamwidth (formerly ff_land of Livejournal). Please come join the fun! PM me for details.

Warning: Minor spoiler warning for most game events revolving around what Auron reveals to Tidus in Luca.

Mykonos

He's not –

He is –

He cannot – he can't not –

He remembers.

He remembers the pain, the way it bloomed within him, consumed him and all he was. This shell, this foreign being – this agony, how it surges, how it seethes. It is familiar as old bones; as new as a silver dawn. He is made of salt and sin.

This shell knows nothing but pain, and in that knowing, there is nothing but desperate fear.

The fear. The fire.

He is –

There is fire within, and water without, and he knows the rush of that eternal touch. The kiss of life against obsidian flesh, that hiss unending given up to the sky, as blue and restless as the tide.

The tide pulls him. It guides him. At its mercy, he drifts.

And in his drifting, the world is torn asunder.

There is no hope. No hope for such as he.

All that hope – all that intent – all that sacrifice –

Nothing – for nothing –

And in his haze of fire and water, he knows for true.

The cycle continues, and all must play their part –

And for his part –

He never means – never meant –

He is trapped, and his courage becomes his doom. His bones have long turned to stone and his flesh has burned away. He is ash on the wind, he is dust. Caught, floating, spiralling somewhere in the everlasting between, this endless rusted city of dying dreams. The pyreflies wail and he cannot escape their mourning. They do not mourn for him. His greatness, his purpose, it fades to nothing in the wake of this – his part – must play our parts – and his was to be the saving of the world –

And now he will be its destruction. A cruel fate he's chosen.

Chosen. His choice. He didn't want – he doesn't want this –

To watch with eyes that do not see, listen with ears that do not hear. His body, gone, that husk of tender mortality that could not survive the giving; this shell, this great, hulking shell, the world's destruction. Always there, this beast that curled within him, born of fire, this child of fayth and fury and failure.

With eyes that do not see, he sees the world as it breaks beneath him as waves against the shore.

With ears that do not hear, he hears each scream and anguished cry.

And sometimes –

Sometimes, its the call of the gulls in the quiet of morning. And the sun –

To blackest depths, he sinks. Sinks and sighs and lives on, he, the harbinger of divine justice, the most cruel of all those who have come before.

He is shamed beyond reckoning.

He can no longer abide the sun.