Maybe it was the next day and maybe it was a thousand years later -- it was hard to keep track of time down in the hole like that. We didn't have a sunrise and we didn't have a sunset, just that endless tangerine glow all the time from the fungus under the sea and under the sky. I had learned that rhyme as a kid -- any kid who grows up knowing starboard and 'larboard and all that stuff can stand on their head and do a jig while singing red sky at morning, but there wasn't any morning and there wasn't any night, so I was pretty much stuck over whether to take warning or have a delight. There was something else though, besides the fact that we couldn't see the sun circling us, or feel ourselves circling the sun. My heartbeat was the hymn and his heartbeat was the water on the rocks, or maybe it was the other way around -- it was uncountable time, being there, being with him, in love with a dead man and eating pancakes made by a mother fayth and falling back into the ocean bathtub of a guado lawyer. It wasn't real and at the same time it was more real than anything that's ever happened now or since.

I read a book when I was a kid -- hey, don't take that tone with me. Of course I can read, and not just in Al Bhed either. Anyway, I read this book about a girl who gives her guardian the slip and follows this white auroch into a hole in a mountain side. She falls down this hole, right? And she finds all this bogus strange weird stuff and get this, when she finally goes home -- well it doesn't say this, but this is what I knew after I read it. After spending all that time trying to get out of that weird upside down place underground and go back home, all she ever wanted to do was go back.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I wasn't really thinking about all this now, or maybe I was a little, even then. What I was thinking about was that great big pile of fish coils and lacy spines and fins that was Leviathan, but I wasn't exactly preparing to ask him if I could be president of his fan club.

Red and I were sitting on a big flat rock on the black basalt beach. We had unpacked all the spheres we had on us, and sat sorting them like they were piles of captured pyreflies -- blue, yellow, green, pink. This one would build your muscles. That one would fire your brain. This one was the key to something that you knew, but just couldn't remember.

I don't know how much you know about spheres, but there are all kinds, more than I really want to bother to count. They use some kinds to fill that huge blitzball sphere in Luca because it does a lot of things that water just can't do, like hold it's shape like that, for one thing. Other spheres, well, they were fit inside spherecorders and messages were printed on them. When you hold the sphere just right, you can see the messages played back. You can see messages from people who've been dead maybe a really long time recorded on spheres. Well, maybe that's not so impressive these days. Sometimes I think I know more dead people than live ones.

There are other kinds of spheres, though. The spheres that you find after fiends spin off into pyreflies, those never have any secret messages from royal dead guys. They're blank, but I guess they aren't really blank. They're more than blank. They're potential. You can pick one up and hold it close to your chest like it's a little baby animal, and you can feel its heartbeat because its heartbeat is your heartbeat, and it's become you. After you take in a sphere, you're more you than you were before. It doesn't matter what kind of sphere or when or where or how, and it's not really something I'm good at explaining. It's just something you know. You get smarter or you get faster or your get stronger or you understand something that you didn't before, but it's more than that. It's youness. It's meness. When I eat a sphere, I increase my Rikku Quotient. I am more Rikku than I was before, which is pretty much a paradox, because the state of something's Rikkuness is defined by Rikku right? I told you it doesn't really make sense. I don't think it's supposed to.

We had done our hunting and gathered up all those spheres because if we were going to defeat princess fairyfins snake then we were going to have to be more than we were when we started, not just stronger or faster. Better.

So I ate my spheres or I hugged them to my chest, filling out the spaces inside me where I didn't even know there were gaps. Auron did the same thing, slowly. Maybe it's harder for him, filling in the pieces now that he's dead. Maybe it makes him understand more about himself and maybe he doesn't always like it. I think he's stupid because I like him fine: arrogance, brush-offs, and pudding-feedings aside, but maybe this is because Brother dropped me on my head too many times as a baby. What can I say? You should not leave a kid prone to full body flailing in charge of a baby or that baby will grow up to lust after dead men.

At last he undid the strap that kept that nog jug riding over his hip and sat it between us. I thought maybe he was going to offer me a little more courage in the shot but what he really did was undo a tight little knotted string that hung off the jug and let the beads on the string carefully spill off in front of me. The last of the beads was purple and faintly luminous and I realized that it wasn't really a bead at all, but some kind of sphere that I'd never seen before. He held it up in front of me, thumb and forefinger, and it shimmered in the orange light.

"Are you ready?" he asked.

I took a deep breath and squinched all the muscles I could manage up into tight little bunches, then I forced myself to relax. I nodded.

"Open your mouth."

I did, and although I wasn't asked I also closed my eyes because if this was going to be anything like the last thing he fed me, I didn't want to see it going down or coming up.

He put it on my tongue and it rolled there, dissolving slowly like a a ball of honey -- a trickquid, because it wasn't really wet, just loose and losing shape. I closed my mouth and it was warm, draining faintly away into some deeper part of me, slipping off down my throat, into my head, into my self.

And then there it was, all at once, like a bullet to the brain. It hit me so hard that I reeled backward and maybe my brains would have come slopping out when my skull split from hitting the rock behind me, but he launched himself forward, as if he'd been crouched for it, his bare hand a cap over the back of my wobbly blond head. We ended up in a tangle of red velvet and arms and legs, and when I came back to myself I was panting, eyes dilated, and the world was still spinning all around the glare that I caught off the rim of his glasses.

He sat back and I tried to sit up feebly, but fell limply backward again.

"Not yet. It's too much for you yet." He said.

"All right, boss." Is what I managed, because I wasn't in any kind of mood to argue with the doctor.

I laid there for a long time, my head turned so I could look out at the sea and at that crystal tower that presided over it.

At last he asked, "Are you afraid?"

I thought about it.

"No. Not any more."

The Shape of His Heart

By Gabihime ( gabihime at gmail dot com )

Chapter Eight: Killing the Chernobyl Cowboy

We were almost ready. I say almost because there was one more thing that I could do to make us more ready. Maybe I'll never be as tall and brooding and statuesque as Lulu, or as shining bright and hope-beaming as Yuna, but Spira has only got one Princess Aurora of the Al Bhed, and if you are slow on the uptake (like Brother), that Princess of the Al Bhed is me. I can't summon and I'm no healer and I'm really no kinds of mage. I'm fast, sure, but I still pretty much hit like a girl (don't get me wrong, I am still surefire convinced I could take down Uncle Braska in a fistfight), and maybe that makes me the girl that they let into the party only cause she won't go away -- or because she is so radiantly beautiful, one or the other.

Nope, I can't summon. I can't rain down flares or curagas or anything.

But I can do something better than all of that.

I can synth.

Now I know you're thinking to yourself, great Rikku, I agree that you are awesome, but is this really the time to be throwing a big hip-hip-hooray party for yourself? Maybe this is not the best time for your amazing synthing prowess.

Wrong. Now? Is the best time there has ever been for my amazing synthing prowess. Do you know why? It is because I spent the whole morning after my transcendental awakening skin diving into the tangerine sea. I had a net full of weeds and skins and scales and stones that I had dragged out of the silky, spilling insides of some pretty nasty fiends. I dunno if Auron really knew what I was up to or not. He sure didn't say anything about it, just sat on the beach with his eyes closed meditating or something. I say or something because I am convinced he was staring right at my delicate secrets every time I was out of the surf to pile up my treasures and my back was turned. Trust me. A girl knows when someone is staring at her delicate secrets.

Anyway, he didn't say anything but that could've been because I was already doing something he expected me to do. He's not the kind of guy who gives praise out when he sees you doing something that he has already thought of. He's the kind that gives you a talking to when you aren't doing these magical things he's already thought of. Yeah, as you might've already guessed, he is the kind of guy who sometimes needs a punch in the face really, really badly.

Fortunately, I am a totally forgiving soul.

Still, I did not harbor any hopes at all that he was ready to let me start fondling his nihontou, no matter what my excellent intentions were. It's probably all for the best anyway, since I'm pretty sure I already synthed that thing to its limit one night while he was asleep or something. Hey, I never like to leave all that sexy potential just lying there wasted when it could be put to awesome use.

So, since I am not usually in the habit of carrying a bunch of extra swords strapped to my lovely and petite little back, I invited myself back into the temple of Indara and to see Leviathan.

He was lying with his eyes closed in this hammock, square in the middle of the patch of tangerine light that came down through the big rose window. I kid you not. Wearing sunglasses and fanning himself with a little fan of gull feathers or something. Ashura was settled on her knees nearby reading him poetry. I told you he had it good.

When I came sauntering up he pushed his sunglasses down his nose so he could take stock of me idly over them. He waved languidly at Ashura and she thoughtfully paused in her reading.

"So, have you come to honor our agreement, fry?"

I rolled my eyes, "Do I look like I have? Do you see Tall, Dark, and Sinister anywhere? No, I didn't think so." I blew the hair up out of my eyes and artfully changed the subject, because I am smooth like that. "Say Levi, you have an armory somewhere in this temple, right? You used to have priests and guards and stuff, before, you know, everything."

He pushed his sunglasses back up his nose and fell bonelessly back into his hammock like I'd just spoiled his fun for the whole day.

"There's a staircase in the east chancel. There ought to be something left in the armory down there. If you find anything you like, go ahead and take it."

"Well, I was gonna anyway," I answered sassily, my hands on my hips. Ashura laughed musically into the back of her hand.

"I know," he answered laconically and then he waved Ashura to begin reading her poetry again, and with that I was dismissed.

I am going to assume that you have never been down into a centuries old armory in a temple that has been abandoned by everything living -- even the bite bugs -- for about a jillion years. Forgive me if I am jumping to conclusions and you do this every week or something.

It was one of those things that made me glad of all the Kilika Jones stuff my dad has been dragging me into since the time I learned how to drool (and who to drool on). For one thing, I am not unfamiliar with ruins, even ruins under the ocean, which this one fortunately was not. Leviathan had not conveniently forgotten to mention that the back stairs were flooded or something, or that the whole room was protected by robot guard alligators. If there's one thing I hate, it's a robot guard alligator.

The room I found was pretty dusty and it was really cluttered, like for years whenever anybody had found something that they didn't want crowding up the temple upstairs they had just dumped it down the stairs and hoped it rolled into the armory. It wasn't just weapons or shields and things, a lot of it was just junk. All kinds of completely random stuff left by people on pilgrimages before the temple had become lost, and then maybe some stuff that had been left since the temple had become lost. The weird thing about it was that it wasn't just all piled up helter-skelter, like you'd expect in a room of stuff that had been left behind by people that had been dead forever. It was all carefully ordered, and, if a little dusty, it almost had the look of of a museum -- of somebody's private collection. Like some razor boned guado attorney still liked to go down those back stairs and look at the things that been left behind, to hold them and think about them, about the people he'd known who were all dead, except for Ashura. About the world above that had forgotten them even after their sacrifice.

And still, he kept singing.

Maybe I didn't want to punch him in the face so much right then either.

So I cleared myself a little space in that dead-end museum and set up my own little synth shop with my pack of junk from all over Spira and my net of stuff recovered from a tangerine sea. I found a sword that would do for old Captain Blood and I found enough stuff to build myself a new targe. I had my own beloved Deus Ex back by this point, as you might remember, as well as my revolver, so I was pretty much set other than the targe. The bracer I couldn't do much about. It was a good bracer, and as I related earlier, I'm the one who made it as good as it is. Sadly, being awesome means you are also maxed, which means you lack flexibility and while I could screw a piece of metal into a ring and bend that to fit onto one of my gloves and make myself a dandy targe, I didn't have the more specialized tools and materials I'd need to make a new bracer out of basically nothing.

My pops always tells me Rikku, pa bnybynat. He claims it is ancient advice from a worthy source, but I bet he's just repeating something he heard some little kids saying. Besides, I don't have room in my pack to carry parts for fifty shields or rings and armguards when you can buy that stuff at any respectable travel agency. That space is reserved for all the weird crap I dig out of fiends. My pack is always jingling and tinkling and fluttering with the weight of chocobo feathers and little vials of sand and holy bells and old scribbled notes and counterweights for pendulums and the gil that used to be in your pockets.

Handicaps aside, I am Rikku J. Cidolphus. I could get us ready in a hurricane even if I had no arms.

And I hammered and cut and sanded and blasted and screwed things together in ways they had never before been screwed. Ashura brought me some lunch and watched me work for a while, all sweaty with the hair stuck to my face.

"He wants you to win." She said at last and really pretty much out of the blue. I would've forgotten she was there maybe if not for the constant wash of love that came over me whenever she was close.

"Huh?" Was all I said, because I am not like Auron and full of limited, grave, monumental sayings that everyone likes to quote. I am mostly full of stuff like "Huh?" "No way!" and "Yikes!"

"He wants you to win," she repeated and then tilted her head, "I want you to win as well. But mark, Daughter of Cidolphus, this will not make your battle easier. As the fayth, we have a great deal of pride, but as our otherselves? You cannot imagine, Rikku of Cidolphus."

As she spoke, I could hear the hymn echoing around me and deep inside my bones and guts and blood, like it would almost shake me apart. That old historian guy had told me once that the hymn was a song from another world. I can believe that.

"We're going to win because we have to," I answered fiercely, because I could feel that too, with all the guts and blood and bone in my body. There was no other way and we would do it, and this I believed with all parts and pieces that were me. I was small and spindly and dry as the sand in Sanubia, but I believed it.

"In Zanarkand," she said appreciatively, "You would have made a strong summoner."

And I didn't have much to say to that.

Maybe it was the next day and maybe it was a thousand years later. I pulled on my gloves and I fitted my new targe and I strapped Deus ex Machina around my fist, and then Auron shouldered his nihontou, the electricity crackling along the blade so it made our loose hair tremble and dance. And he went first and I went after, and we crossed the gossamer bridge of light and butterfly wings and song.

In the middle of the tiled floor of Indara, standing in the center of the light spilled from the great rose window and on his carpet figured over with all those strange creatures of the sea, Leviathan stood with his long arms folded behind his back, and Ashura stood behind him, the queen sentinel, as beautiful as a golden pearl.

"We have come, Fayth of Indara," Auron's voice boomed in the acoustic space, level and sure, "To honor the terms of our bargain."

"Rikku of Cidolphus is in agreement?" asked Ashura, her moon golden eyes on me.

"She is," answered Leviathan nonchalantly, waving her off.

"Hey," I shouted, leaning forward and balling my fists.

Leviathan raised an eyebrow, "You are, are you not, fry?"

I crossed my arms and couldn't help but look sullen. I was feeling sullen. I wanted to kick sand into his elegantly angled face.

"I am," I admitted, although I didn't want to, "But I wanted to say so myself."

He shrugged and passed an amused look to Auron which I'm sure he thought said oh, what will they think of next and said only, "Forgive me." It didn't sound so much like an apology as it did a royal command. He continued. "Then you do me honor. I will meet your challenge. Ashura!"

I could hear the golden queen singing softly to us, and I didn't know if the fight had already started or it was over and we were dead just like that, but if we were, then death was nice. I was suddenly all over gentle warm, safe, carried along by the sound of her music. It was like being inside of white magic, shimmer and light and warmth and the passing flash of grace, and I tilted my head back and felt myself slowly touch back to the earth. I felt more alive than sunshine and waterfalls and skiprope and dancing -- more alive than anything -- and then it slowly drifted out of me, like heat out of a cooling engine, and I began to feel like myself again.

"She has healed you so that our fight will be fair," said the king of the oceans, "Now, come."

I didn't think much in those first few seconds. I knew I couldn't. I knew I didn't have time. I had come with yellow feathers between my fingers -- a parting gift from Frances -- and before anyone had moved, I had rained haste down on both of us.

But Leviathan had already moved, a great pulse upward so that he was no longer a blade thin guado lawyer, but now that terrible thing that I had seen drawn so many times, painted on everything, everywhere, but had never understood until now. He was a mountain, piles and piles of coils all heaped together and uncoiling into this impossible length of aquamarine scales that cast rainbows when the light glinted off of them. He was fins and spikes and spines and whiskers and the eyes of a god and suddenly I was ankle deep in water and it was pouring in everywhere, from every crevice and window, from the mouth of every statue, from the sky as rain even though we were indoors, and through the wide open double doors behind us. He reared his head, like a great snake about to strike, his fin wings flared and his whole body undulating as if he were riding a current. And he did nothing, but I could see it gathering behind him, sucked toward him, around our ankles, building, a high, terrible wave.

He'll drown us, is what I wanted to shout, but there was no time, and Auron had already run forward, head down, shoulder behind that blade that sang with electricity, his dark hair flying out behind him in a whipping snake's tail. I put down my own head and dug my fingers around one of the curved blades of Deus ex Machina and I let the lighting ripple off of me, teeth gritted, feeling the heaven shock punishment of thundaga raining down on the sea serpent once, and then twice -- a trick Auron had helped me steal from Lulu and make into Rikku.

I could hear Leviathan scream and toss in rage, and I could see Auron circling his tail, jumping up when it was low and catching it like a swing, climbing the writhing mountain of Leviathan so that his strikes counted before Leviathan screamed and bucked him off again. I had already drawn my gun, and this time when I called the lightning down on him I aimed at his pitching head and I shot at his great god eyes.

It was lighitngthunderelectricity again and again, as fast as I could call it down, shooting when I could, popping tablets as the magic drained out of me, through me like I was a sieve, and I couldn't even see Auron any more, and then, and then and then --

And then it was over us, it was on us, it was through us, the tsunami of the sea fang, that impossible wall of water that broke all my bones and shattered my teeth and slammed me into the floor, spent and limp and trembling. But then I was up, swimming like mad through the cathedral filled to the high arched ceilings with a million tons of water because I was Rikku J. Cidolphus, synth genius, and I had eaten that wave. I called thundaga and I called thundaga and I called thundaga and I looked for Auron, I looked for Auron, I looked for Auron and I couldn't find him, too much water everywhere -- and then I found him, limp, weak and still as a stone, still as a stone.

Auron can't swim, I screamed to myself.

He's already dead, I screamed back.

Leviathan threw me against one of the great pillars by flashing his tail through the water like a whip and I saw stars and I suddenly had a moment vision of Jecht fighting Leviathan alone, because neither Braska nor Auron could swim.

I called thundaga and I called thundaga andI called thundaga, but it wasn't enough, not me alone, and I could feel my bones breaking when Leviathan threw me against the wall, and I couldn't slug the potion fast enough to knit them back together again before I was thrown into something else.

I needed something. I needed something. I had to do something or we were going to lose, Leviathan would pulp me against the wall until I couldn't twitch any more and then all of it would be gone, my auroch hole -- there and back again, and what Rikku found there -- Auron. Everything. Everything. I bet it all on the chump's odds that I would win. I would win.

I called the lightning and he slung me hard against the wall, and I could feel the water rushing back past us, gathering behind him in another great tidal wave.

Strength. Faith. Hope. Love. Determination. What was it that changed the world? It wasn't death. It wasn't losing. It wasn't giving up.

My ear left a pink trail when I turned, blood from my head. There was water on my brain and I wouldn't be able to think much longer. I could still see Auron down there, a dark red stone, his coat whipping fast in the riptide as Leviathan drew the water back to himself. I turned my head and shoved the half empty potion bottle into my ear, hoping that it would clot the blood enough so I could sling down a few more spells. I called the lightning, and I wrenched down deep, as far as I could go, feeling back, feeling back for what it was that I needed, that I knew, and I found it, I found it finally in the dark and the mess of my guts, and I grabbed hard at it, as hard as I could hold, my nails digging into it and shattering, so that they bled, jagged, and I yanked it out, I yanked it out of the dark lost place where it had been, and I threw it up for the world to see, and it rained down on both of us.

Float.

And we were on the water, we were on the water, our feet making gentle dimples like we were messiahs or saints, and I called the lightning and I fell onto my knees, into the sea, but I stayed on top of that great mass of water. Something inside me was leaking, dripping out where I'd wrenched the lost thing free, and I couldn't stand. I doubled over like a fetus, the blood from my ear in my eyes, gluing one of them shut. I panted and I bled, inside and out, and I watched Auron run along the wave crests like they were a whispering sea of grass and I saw him call the twister, his feet one after another in that last, final spiral of his blade and of the ki wind that would end this, end us, end everything, and I heard Leviathan trumpet, and I shivered.

Then everything was gone, the water all at once, and the mass of dark serpent coils. There was just the floor of the temple, the great tapestry rug, and water dripping slowly down from the ceiling. I could only see Auron's feet, because he was standing. I laughed and it was thready and weak and I couldn't move my head to look up at him, to look around for Leviathan. I could feel it pooling out of me, everywhere, all of me out onto the floor where water still stood half an inch deep. I heard Auron uncork a bottle and I smelled the faint cinnamon spice of Elixir, but then there was a gentle voice.

"No. It's too late." That was Ashura.

"Damnit, It can't be too late. Not this. Not again."

I saw Auron's knee very close to my face and then I felt someone pick up my head, but I couldn't understand who it was.

"It is beyond you to heal her, Auron of Faris. She has split open her insides, casting that spell. That was impressive magic. It is not of this plane."

I could hear him swearing again, and I felt like I should say something about it, but I couldn't think of anything, I couldn't think of how to say.

"She is brave and resourceful," that was Leviathan. "And it may please you to know that she does love you. She is worthy to have been born under my star." He sounded desperately pleased with himself. I wanted to laugh again, but I didn't have that left any more.

"And now she will die."

"Peace, Auron of Faris. I said that it was beyond you to heal her. It is not beyond me."

I felt like I was lifted up again, but this time it was warm and filling, and I could feel whatever was leaking out of me still, and then stop. I could feel it all being knit together again, warm and fine and sure. I could feel all of me being knit together again, like I was a scarf that had been pulled apart and then somehow woven back together again, all of the same yarn, all of the same weave, all of the same Rikku.

I felt the ground again under my feet and I staggered, but then I was against an iron shoulder, a gloved hand on my own bare shoulder, and I hiccuped and I panted, and then I finally opened my eyes.

"Congratulations, Auron Faris and Rikku Cidolphus," said Leviathan, and at first I only saw his knees, but gradually the rest of him came into focus as I learned how to hold my head again. His arms were crossed over his bare chest and he did look extraordinarily pleased with himself. "You have bested me in fair and open combat, something no other mortals of this plane may claim."

I let out the biggest, lamest, goofiest puppy sigh, and then I really did go limp. I heard Auron swear again as he jumped to catch me before I said how-do-you-do-good-morning with the floor again. He picked me up and held me because he probably didn't know what else to do with me. He couldn't just put me down on the floor, which still had standing water in it enough to see tide pool life ekeing around his boots.

"She is still weak," noted Leviathan, executively. "You will have a day of rest."

A day of rest. I wasn't sure when the last time I'd had one of those was. Maybe before I could walk.

"You will have a day of rest," he repeated and then he bowed respectfully to the graceful woman at his side. "Then you will fight the All Holy. Then you must fight Ashura."

Ashura.