No White Dove

My Mother Was No White Dove

no dove at all, coo-rooing through the dusk

and foraging for small seeds

My mother was the clouded over night

a moon swims through, the dark against which stars

switch themselves on, so many already dead

by now (stars switch themselves off

and are my mother, she was never

so celestial, so clearly seen)

-Excerpt from Reginald Shepherd's "My Mother Was No White Dove"

…

At thirty-two years old, Rikku of Cid of Bikanel died.

She had not lived a half-life, by any means. She was survived by Yuna, Tidus, Lulu, Wakka, Kimahri, and all their families, as well as her own family. Her brother and her father, who had outlived her—a parent's worst nightmare.

Rikku would never see Yuna's dance for her. She had not believed in the dance, but Yuna did, and she was not a fiend for Yuna's love.

But she was dead, and the dead do not see the living without severe consequences, as they all had learned. She would not see the lightness of Yuna's feet, as if each step seared her soles and made her leap away. She would not hear the phantom drums surge like blood through veins, unified. She would not see the tears on Yuna's cheeks glint in the pyrefly light.

Instead, Rikku would wake in a hazy, glowing dreamworld and try to find her way. Endless fields of poppies, daisies, tulips, daffodils, and flowers with petals and colors she had never seen and was sure did not exist, stretched before her eyes. She walked for days and did not tire, did not thirst, did not hunger, did not sweat in the high, cheerful sun.

After a week or a month or a year, she could not tell, she found her mother.

"Mom?" Her voice was an ache which plucked the air between them. The alien flowers bobbed and weaved in a phantom wind. Her mother's skin gave off a light even in the bright sheen of this world.

In life, Rikku knew her mother's face had slowly faded in her memory, then disappeared completely, reduced to faint contours and the impression of kisses, baking, and the smell of sandstorms.

"Rikku," her mother said, and her voice was sad as Rikku charged into her arms. Her mother's hands did not lift to embrace her. They hung limply at her sides.

Rkku was aware, as she flung her body toward her unresponsive mother, of the sensation of warm water on her skin. She realized, as she looked across the vast field of flowers, that her mother stood behind her, unmoved.

"What…?"

"Rikku, I've missed you."

"Mom, why can't—why can't I—" She was a child again, thirty years gone, three years old and lost in the most beautiful place she had ever seen—more beautiful than Macalania, than the endless wastes of Home.

"Why can't I touch you?"

"The dead do not touch, Rikku. That is only for the living. The dead think. The dead dwell. Then they move on."

"Move on? Move on where? I just got here!" She tried, and failed, to grasp her mother's hand in hers. She wanted to trace the lines of her mother's palm, memorize every plane of her face, her long golden hair, her hypnotic, sad green eyes.

She laughed, a sound which ricocheted from obstacles unknown and echoed around them. Rikku wondered how a field could echo, then wondered, if she was dead, why wasn't it better? Had she done something wrong? Was this it?

"Is… is this all of it? This is the Farplane?"

"This is the Farplane," her mother confirmed. "And this is only all if you choose it."

And to her horror, her mother began to fade. "Wait, wait. Where are you going? Mom. Mom!"

"Rikku," she sighed, her voice trailing away. "I'm waiting for your father. If I stay with you, you'll never leave. And you need to move on. You were meant for more than dwelling."

Rikku dropped to her knees in the flowers and cried, and she never tired of crying, but at some point she decided she should probably stop. Her mother had not come back in a week, a month, a year; she could not tell the time, really. But she had not come back, and crying had not summoned her.

So Rikku heaved herself off the sun-baked earth and walked.

She wondered about Uncle Braska, but he did not appear. She wondered about the rakish, gritty Jecht from the spheres, but he did not appear. Keyakku did not appear.

Then she saw Auron.

He was the first person she had seen in so long, she almost walked right by him. He had become a part of the red, red poppies, his coat bleeding into them where he stood, as if he was dripping color. His coat even swayed with the blooms in the phantom breeze.

"Rikku," he rumbled in that voice, a voice twining through her dreams for years and years. Even when her mother's face had fled from her memory, she remembered Auron's voice every day. So she froze and could not find her limbs to move until he said her name again.

She turned, slow, tensing for the blow. When she laid eyes on him, the urge to touch him hit her like a slap. She had not felt anything in a century here, in a millennium. When she finally felt again, felt the need to touch, it almost crippled her in the knowledge she could not fulfill it, left her lying in the flowers limbless and gutted.

"Hey, Auron," she said, not like, "Hey, Auron, where the hell did you go." Not like, "Hey, Auron, why didn't you tell us all that time that you were dead and going to leave us behind?" Not like, "Hey, Auron, I didn't know a sword that big could chop my heart into such tiny pieces."

Not like what she wanted to say.

He seemed surprise to see her there, his one good eye wide. Even here, dead, he looked the same—the coat, the eye, the jug. She wondered then, for the first time, what she looked like. Did she wear those fashion-murdering green monstrosities she called shorts when he had known her? Would she be a sixteen-year-old girl all over again?

She found herself dressed in her favorite work outfit: a short, light blue tanktop underneath short black overalls, with electric blue rubber boots. She became aware of the feeling of an enormous tangled mess of braids clinking and jingling between her shoulder blades.

"I see your fashion sense did not improve upon aging," Auron said, and she wanted to deck him and hug him all at once.

"I see yours didn't either," she blurted, then wanted to clap her hands over her mouth and cry. Despite the swelling of her heart at seeing him ,her hands itched to kill him all over again.

Possessed of a sudden impulse, Rikku darted forward and snatched at his shoulders, tried to slap his forehead, tried to knock his knees out from under him. "Why, why, why can't I touch you?" she wailed. "Is this… is this hell? Oh, god, I didn't think I was that bad. I didn't mean to make that kid cry when I knocked him down in tag!"

Auron's one good eyebrow arched. "When…?"

"Nevermind that," she scowled. "The point is, why can't I touch you?"

"The dead do not touch," he said and shrugged, the most carefree action she had ever seen him perform, ever.

"Auron doesn't shrug. Auron kicks ass. Auron stands there and says, 'Hn,' and gives out wise advice like, 'This is your story.'" She threw her hands into the air. "I am in hell."

"You are on the Farplane."

"Really? Can't it be the Farplane and hell at the same time?"

He growled. "Now that you're here, I'm betting it is."

Maybe five minutes later, when Rikku had decided she would talk to him again, she approached him, tried to punch him in the chest, and burst into tears.

"I missed you, you idiot," she sobbed. He made the vague motion of putting his arms around her. The sensation of lukewarm water trickling over her skin occurred again, and she cried even harder. "We all missed you."

"We are here now," he said. "There's no need to cry."

"Where is 'here,' anyway?" she sniffed, rubbing the snot and tears from her face. As soon as she smeared her hand over her face, the mess disappeared, as if she had never cried in the first place. The sun glittered high in the sky, and the poppies and daisies and all the flowers waved gentle caressing her bare calves above her ankle boots.

"I told you. The Farplane."

"Well, why does the Farplane suck so hard?" she whined, picking at a not-loose thread on her pockets until it came loose under her fingers and began to unravel.

"It doesn't always suck." The slang tumbling from his lips sounded awkward, and she raised her eyebrows at him.

She said, "You're too old to say stuff like 'suck.'"

"If I'm too old, then so are you."

"Hey, hey, mister. I'm only thirty-two. You're, like, a hundred-and-fifty. Not my fault you age well."

"Thirty-two," he breathed, as if stunned. "You died… at thirty-two?" His voice softened as he said, "So young."

"Not that young." She crossed her arms and tried to look at anything but the open pity on his face. When she glanced back, it was gone, replaced with anger.

"What happened? Did you get yourself in some kind of trouble?"

She glared at him. "Listen here, you! Just because I died kind of early doesn't automatically mean that it was because of something I did!"

He moved forward and made as if to grab her shoulders, his face suddenly urgent. "What happened?" he hissed. "Tell me everything. Yuna? Tidus? How are they? Kimahri, Lulu, Wakka?" Lastly, as if an afterthought, he added, "Spira?"

"Same old, same old, I guess," she said, scuffing her feet in the dirt, uncomfortable with his closeness, even with the knowledge that he could not touch her if he tried.

"Tell me," he commanded, and planted himself in the flowers. The stems bent and crumpled beneath the weight of his magnificent body, all muscles sheathed in black and red. She wondered why the flowers could touch him and she could not.

"Yuna and Tidus have three kids. Jecht is twelve, Auron is ten, and little Sahra is just turning eight. Her birthday is… is next week," she said, hit hard by the knowledge that she would never see that birthday. "Or it was. I don't understand time here."

"Time has no dominion here," he said, waving a hand at the sun, grinning happily in its high perch.

She joined him on the ground. "Is it just flowers? I'm getting sick of flowers."

"There's more, but first you have to tell me about Spira."

"You mean you don't know all this already?" she cried, exasperated. She shook her head, beads flying and smacking her cheeks in a wild clamor. "I thought the dead watched over us for all eternity and stuff." She waved her hand across the vast, cloudless sky, as if to indicate all of time and space.

"No," he said. "The dead can't see the living."

"You did," she pointed out.

"There were consequences. You know that," he shot back. "Tell me of Spira."

"Okay, okay, hold your horses already. What do you even want to know? I don't know what to tell you. I mean, Lulu and Wakka have Vidina and Chappu now, and Chappu looks just like Lulu A copy in boy form, I swear. He and Jecht get up to too much trouble. You should hear the way Lulu says their names, like a freakin' whip-crack. She's all Chappu Caluht and Jecht Braska, and they're all we swear it wasn't us, mom, Aunt Lu. Never works, though. I swear the woman's psychic." She shivered at the thought of Lulu's haunting red eyes. "Creepy."

After a pause, Auron turned, almost hesitant. She had never seen him so open with his emotions. Rikku supposed dying for good might change a person. "What about your children?"

She laughed. "You must be joking. I can barely take care of myself, much less kids."

"Your husband?"

She just stared at him for a few minutes before saying, "There is no husband. I'm survived by my friends and my stupid Brother and my dad."

"You are survived by more than that," he said softly, searching her face.

To break the tension, she shrugged. After that, she told him everything he needed to know, starting from his last minute amongst the living and ending on the day of her death.

He did not ask her again how she died.

When she had finished, they sat in silence for what might have been days. Rikku contented herself with picking the flowers around her until she had cleared a two-foot radius and created a foot high pile of dismembered flower parts. Auron stood, but he did not move to offer his hand. Their eyes met and held for a long moment. He said, "I told you there is more."

"You should show me," Rikku replied.

She watched as his one eye slid closed, his head tipped back, and she heard him inhale deeply through his nose. His chest expanded beneath his huge coat, and suddenly, they were no longer in the field of flowers. Rikku choked and flailed in the water, sinking like a stone. She remembered then, the feeling of swimming, learning painstakingly what she had not been taught in the dry, dry lands of Home.

When she surfaced, Auron floated calmly next to her, treading water like a pro.

"You could've warned me!" she shrieked, then broke into coughs and vomited up water.

"You don't need to breathe here. Which means you can't drown. You hadn't figured that out?" Amusement laced his tone.

"Well, I've figured it out now," she spat once she was done puking her guts up. This place had the same ethereal glow as the field, the same sun impossibly bright in the sky. Auron's skin glowed, and the water refracted light at every angle like a shattered mirror, almost blinding her. Even though she squinted against the light, it was more like habit. She felt no pain.

He laughed, a sound rough but carefree at the same time, and she wanted so badly to touch him, she thought she might dissolve into the water around them, her molecules mutinying.

"How did you do that?" she asked, continuing her tread beside him. No sign of land interrupted the horizon, and the water seemed fresh—not salty, like the sea. "Where are we now?"

"Where I want us to be." He tipped onto his back, and his boots broke the surface with a splash as his legs rose. "I wanted it this way, so now it's this way."

"You just … you wanted it this way. That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard."

"Rikku… you're dead. Many things are possible now."

"So if I simply wish hard enough…" She repeated his movements from earlier, tilting her head back, closing her eyes, and breathing. Even though she apparently didn't need to do that anymore.

Her feet, now divested of the sodden boots and gloriously bare, hit soft, hot sand. Maybe a tad too hot, but she liked it that way, and she dug her toes into it, sighing. She opened her eyes, met with the stunning sight of waves breaking on the beach, soughing at the edges of a tiny cay.

A small pool broke the middle of the island, surrounded by soft grass and shady trees. Behind her ear, Auron hummed thoughtfully. "Good work. Not all are so imaginative. But you can do more than that."

He looked with hard eyes out toward the water, and buildings taller than any Rikku had ever seen rose dripping from the sea, water cascading from the tops and the sides until hundreds, even thousands, of windows slid into place on its glittering, gleaming outer shell. No faces pressed the glass, but it stood magnificent to behold, and she feasted her eyes on it.

"What is it?" she asked.

"I call it a sky-scraper," he said. "Make one."

So she did, but it was a hideous shade of orange. He turned to her with lifted eyebrows.

"Shut up. It's pretty."

From then on, they created together, standing on a beach, twining and joining their minds in a way they could not with their physical flesh. Rikku thought this might still be her own personal hell—all the power in the universe, hers to create and destroy at will. But no human skin beneath her hands, warm and alive.

The first time she created a living creature—a single butterfly, emerging from a tulip and fluttering around her hair, then away—she stopped and sat in place for a long, long time. Then Auron curled a hand in front of her eyes and opened it, and hundreds of butterflies streamed from his open palm like flowers blooming. They transformed into sparkling bubbles of all colors.

"That's the girliest thing I've ever seen you do."

"If it makes you stop brooding, I'll do it again."

She laughed, and an odd tension strung between them, threatened to snap like a harp string, notes all discordant and upset.

"Do it again," she murmured. So he did.

After some time of her running and popping the bubbles with her tongue, he spoke. "Why don't you have any children?"

"I told you already. I can't even take care—"

"That's a lie," he said baldly, "so don't say it again. You would make a good mother."

She nearly choked on the sorrow that surged in her throat. "You don't know that. I might be the crappiest mom ever, and then how would you feel for wishing my poor, tortured kids into existence? I'd probably lose them in the desert, and they'd starve to death or die of thirst or get eaten by a bunch of rabid cactuars. I'd be a terrible mom."

"No, you wouldn't. I can see you unmarried, but I can't see you without children."

"Don't get me wrong," she said, wondering why she was even explaining herself. She didn't think he'd understand. "It's not like I didn't want them. The right man just never came along."

He looked at her for a long, long moment, and she thought maybe he knew that every man that ever came along fell short in the specter of him. She measured every man who arrived with flowers and kisses against the sinew in his arms, the strength in the flat planes of his stomach and his hips. She measured them against the sway of his coat in the breeze, the thump of his boots on inn stairs. She measured them against long nights in lightning strikes, in snow, and she measured them against the amber gleam of his one good eye.

They all came up short, every single time.

"Maybe that's for the best," he said, humor in his voice. She wished she could yank off his sunglasses and see him better. Before she could bite his head off, he continued. "Your kids would probably take over the world. And no one would be able to stop them."

She grinned. "Duh."

They competed, sometimes. When she made something beautiful, he made something even more stunning, until they were outdoing themselves left and right, a whole landscape of nothing but the strangest architectures, the likes of which would not stay standing in the physical realm of Spira. They twisted into the sky and reached, unhindered by rules or climate or terrain.

"It was a long sickness," she said, finally, after what might have been days of silence, of nothing but the feeling of reshaping atoms with their thoughts. "I got weaker and weaker, for a long time. Healers said it was something in my mind. I was okay for a while, but after a year or so, it got ugly."

"I'm sorry," he murmured, and with a flick of his eye, a column of sand rose from the depths of the ocean around them and waited for his command.

"Me too," she said. "I should've gone out with a bang. Like, maybe, I could have died fighting a bunch of rabid cactuars to save a burning bus full of crying orphans."

"Does the bus have to be burning, or is that optional?" He sounded almost angry, and the sand sculpture he shaped looked furious in its design, harsh angles, cutting lines.

"I guess that's optional." In his fervor, she watched as he started waving his arms around in time with the sand he formed. There was no need for it, but he did it anyway. "Are you okay?"

"You shouldn't be dead," he snapped. "You should have lived. You were going to be someone's mother, someone's wife. You should have died at ninety-two, not thirty-two."

"Well, I didn't," and suddenly she was yelling. "And now I guess you're stuck with me!"

He stopped his creating and stared at her, his mouth a grim slash. "I'm sorry."

"For what? That I'm dead? That I never had kids or got married? I didn't want to get married, Auron. I lived a full life, okay? It was my time." Even as she said it, a few fat tears dribbled from her eyes.

He stood away from her, at a loss, his arms limp at his sides and his whole body stricken.

Later, she summoned food—sweet strawberries practically bursting with juices, peaches almost escaping their skin they were so ripe; ham glistening with a honey-roasted sheen; potatoes baked and steaming. She ate it all, never feeling full, never hungry in the first place. Auron sipped from the jug at his hip. Just as he had never been drunk in life, he was not drunk in death.

The food didn't help ease the ache in her swollen, yearning, phantom heart.

"What are you even doing here?" she asked, when she was finished. "Where is everyone else? Uncle Braska? Jecht? Why did you stay when my mother didn't?"

"Because you wanted me here," he said.

"I wanted my mother," she said, strained. "But she left."

"You wanted me more."

They looked at each other, her sitting in the sand, him standing, and gritted her teeth and pounded her hand on the soft ground.

"This isn't fair! This is so stupid!" She rose. "I'm going back."

"No, you're not," he said. "Rikku, I already told you, the consequences aren't worth it."

"You went back," she accused, pacing around him. "It's not fair that I can't."

"Yes, I did. At great cost. Look what it did to you."

She stopped. She had had nightmares, for years, about Tidus and Auron disappearing before her eyes, the very fabric of their beings falling to pieces in front of her, floating away forever.

"The dead aren't meant to mingle with the living," he said, and his voice was so careful, he almost sent her over the edge again.

"This can't be all there is," she said, broken, and slid to her knees. "This can't be it."

"It's not," he said, and uttered the familiar words. "There's more."

"I don't want to create anymore," she said. "This sucks."

She wanted so badly to touch him as he stared across the gap of sand at her, as she listened to the roar of the waves crashing on the beach. There were never storms here, not unless she wanted them. She wished for the destruction of the world around them, and clouds sprang up, rolled like a stampede across the horizon.

Thunder cracked in the air, and the sea and sand and sky shredded as she screamed, long and loud.

When she was finished, they stood together in a vast, white void. The silence and the nothing stretched for eons. He said, "We can go back."

"You just said we can't," she protested. "Make up your damn mind."

"We can, but you won't like it."

She knew. She had known always, somewhere in the back of her mind. Even as she had taken her first step in the flower fields. Even as her mother had said, "I'm waiting for your father." She had known, somehow.

"I'm not ready yet," she said. Then, "I want to touch you."

"I know."

They tried. She imagined the feeling of kissing him, the sweet tangle of her mouth on his. They approached and could not feel each other. Rikku lifted her hands to his in the air, palm to palm, and she envisioned the feeling of his rough skin on hers. She wanted to run her hands through his hair and smudge his sunglasses. She wanted to punch him in the shoulder and rip his coat off. She ached.

"I want to touch you," she repeated, agonized. "I want you. I want you."

"You never married." He watched the glow of their skin mingle as they approached but did not accomplish touching.

"Because none of them were you. It wasn't love—I never had time to grow up and love you. You weren't there long enough for that."

"You paid for my interference. The dead do not mingle with the living."

"Then what do we do?"

"We move on. All life is recycled, Rikku. When you're ready, I will go with you."

"I was waiting for you," Auron said. I'm waiting for your father, her mother's voice echoed in her mind.

"How did you know?"

"I didn't. I do now. Are you ready to go?"

Their hands dropped, then he held one out to her as if to take her on a long journey. And when she reached for him, this time, they connected, fell into each other. The sensation of lukewarm water vanished, and he was flesh in her hands, real flesh, malleable and alive and breathing and growing. He pulled her into his arms and tucked her under his chin.

"I'm ready," she said.

Their void fractured and fell to pieces.

In a small hut on Besaid, a nondescript woman of nondescript origins gave one last, long wail.

"It's a boy," the midwife cried, and with efficient hands she cut the cord, cleaned the child, swaddled him, and placed him in his mother's arms. He was not crying, like most babies. He stared at her with huge dark eyes, and she smiled at the thatch of dark hair on his head.

The boy grew into a young man and met a young woman, and the instant their eyes connected, he felt like he knew her. At the marketplace, their elbows bumped, and she looked into his irritated expression with the swirling green eyes of the Al Bhed. The mischief inhabiting her gaze, he would later realize, belonged all to her. She pulled the brim of his hat down over his eyes and ran off with his basket of vegetables.

When he took up swordsmanship, the feeling of the blade in his hands was right. She bought a scarf at the marketplace that streamed behind her shoulders and danced with her.

He took ten years to kiss her and two more to marry her. When gray began to thread his hair, she flicked his temples and said it suited him.

They had five children. She was a good mother. He was a good father. Their household was known for loud good times and warm dinners and laughter.

He outlived her by only a year. His heart couldn't take the world without her. When he released his grip on the mortal realm, he woke in a hazy, glowing dreamworld. Endless fields of poppies, daisies, tulips, daffodils, and flowers with petals and colors he had never seen and was sure did not exist, stretched before his eyes. Before he could take a step, he saw her, short black overalls, blue tank top, and electric blue boots.

"Rikku," he said, and he smiled freer than she had ever seen.

"I missed you, you idiot." She extended her hand and said, "Ready?"

He smirked. "Always."

He laced his fingers through hers.