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Spira had changed a lot in two years. Of course it would. The fall of old Yevon and the rise of New Yevon, the Crusaders becoming the Youth League, those were all changes to be expected when the dust settled and people realized that Sin was really gone for good. The fact that the diminished Ronso sought revenge on the Guado for allowing Seymour to become Unsent and add genocide to his list of crimes was bad, but not surprising really. At least the Al Bhed no longer needed to fear reprisal for using machina.The rise of sphere hunting as a profession wasn’t too surprising either, with travel becoming easier and Zanarkand no longer guarded by Yunalesca’s fiends. People were learning to live without fear, whether it was fear of Sin or fear of breaking one of Yevon’s taboos, and all of that was good and normal. He no longer had to worry about fumbling a traditional greeting that he should have known, or accidentally dropping someone’s title, and that wasn’t something he was going to complain about.Yes, even the fact that monkeys had taken over Zanarkand, Sin orphans running around calling themselves sphere hunters, and Lulu and Wakka getting married and having a child were things that Tidus could accept fairly easily. Seeing Zanarkand in ruins when he’d been convinced it was still intact and he could just go back had a way of making him accept the truth at face value.But as Yuna told him everything she’d been doing over the last two years, along with the changes that had happened in Spira during that time, there was one change that he never would have expected, and it wasn’t Yuna’s fairly significant makeover (and that had been one of the more surprising changes).“Wait wait wait,” he interrupted as Yuna was moving on to another subject. “You play blitzball now? You couldn’t even swim before.”He hadn’t meant it to sound like an accusation, but Yuna bit her lip nervously. “Well, as a sphere-hunter, sometimes the target is underwater since so many machina cities were built over water, so I thought it would be good to learn to hold my breath,” she explained, her eyes everywhere but on his face. She was hiding something. “And then the Besaid Aurochs needed our help, and I thought it would be fun.”There was a lot more to blitzball than wanting to have fun, at least if you wanted to win, as he’d told the Besaid Aurochs when he’d first joined, but Yuna deserved to have fun. He wasn’t going to tell her she was wrong for wanting that.“So how’d it go?” he asked curiously, taking her hand. At least Yuna had joined a team with a long standing losing record, so it wasn’t like she could let down the team. Not that he thought she’d be bad, or anything.“Well, it was a little hard at first,” she admitted with a quiet laugh. He could so easily imagine what it must have been like, though at least in blitzball she didn’t have a famous father to live up to. “But eventually we started winning, until there wasn’t much left to win. At some point during all that, they named me the Ace.”“High Summoner Yuna, star player of the Besaid Aurochs?” He could barely believe the words coming out of his mouth, but he said them with a joking smile. He had already loved Yuna, the frail summoner who laughed loudly over Luca without any shame, and who told powerful people, politely but firmly, that they were wrong and she was going to set them right. But that Yuna was a star blitzball player too?What had he done to be so lucky?Actually wait, blinking out of existence probably wasn’t that lucky.“Exactly,” Yuna agreed, smiling for real now. “I always thought summoning was the only thing I was really good at, so it’s been fun, discovering that that’s not true.”“Anyone could have told you that wasn’t true,” he said simply, lacing their fingers together. “Now it’s my turn to cheer from the stands while you lead your team to victory!”“Or we could… play together?” she suggested hesitantly, finally making eye contact again.Ah. “That’s what you wanted all along, isn’t it?” he realized then, noticing a bruise on her leg that could only have come from a blitz tackle. “When you picked up blitz, you wanted-”“Yes,” she admitted, and he couldn’t help himself then.He kissed her, and it was a while before she could get back to telling him about everything he had missed. Yuna being Yuna was what he’d missed most of all.
