Three things can be blamed for this one-shot; me not uploading in a while, deciding I needed a well-rounded 'Author has written' thing at the top of my profile, and most significantly, reading a lot of Guardian1's Kingdom Hearts stories. Check her stuff out, if you don't mind a ton of dark. Her style is mindblowing.
Warning, will be majorly confusing.
Disclaimer: I own not Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy, or a chihuahua wearing a taco and eating salsa. Appropiately, his name is 'Mr. Doesn't-Appear-In-This-Ficlet-At-All'.
Before Traverse Town, Leon vaugely remembered being the kind of child who cried a lot and laughed a lot.
Those sort of children bothered him now. He knew the way he had been, but that didn't mean that he understood it. For the life of him, he just couldn't understand why people had to be so irrational, let everything bleed out into the outside.
What you felt on the inside bursting out into the world all the time seemed like agony. Like having acid inside you.
Apparently, he used to feel differently. But that had been...before.
You heard people phrase it like that a lot in Traverse Town. So very many people remembered the coming of the Heartless and the broken shards they'd left behind, families and lives and people broken like shattered glass and you'd be lucky if you got away with all your limbs intact, if you got away at all. And there were the people who hated themselves for surviving, hated themselves for still being alive when everyone they'd known and loved were worse than dead. When they dared to talk about it, you could hear how much they hated themselves, like they turned their guilt into a whip and flayed themselves into a bloody mess, hearts and consciences torn into crying pulps for the crime of living after they saw their mothers and brothers and fathers and sisters and son and daughters and friends die die die like animals in a slaughterhouse.
Worse, because they weren't dead. Not really. Just deranged things torn out from their bodies, defiled and driven insane by the dark, coming back as shambling horrors that didn't know who you were anymore, didn't know who they were anymore, just empty and dead and wanting to eat anything with a pulse. Didn't matter if you were their closest friend before they died, they would never hold back, and if you didn't fight back, didn't have the resolve to kill a monster that might have been part of your family, you'd die just like they did.
No wonder that half the people in town were half-crazy. It'd explain Yuffie, aside from numerous reasons idiots shouldn't be allowed to marry.
Leon didn't have any illusions. He knew he had no excuses for what he did, knew it wasn't healthy for him to abandon everything about the boy he had been, it wasn't right to cast aside his name (Squall Leonhart, he had no lion's heart, he was a coward, but he WAS a squall, a swirling storm that he had to keep from erupting or he couldn't think himself worthy to do what must be done) andany trace of his lineage (already done, much too easily, even for the mule-stubborn son of a idiot father), but he had no real care for his conscious decision to abandon any right he had to a normal life, or as normal as he could come in this town of the grieving and not-quite-damned. A choice like that, any hope for something like that, had died with Rinoa.
But before had been different. He remembered, dimly, memories of an normal childhood. He had known other kids there, and grown older enough to never ever be able to forget them until the day he died (Irvine Zell Quistis Selphie Rinoa and they're all DEAD now) and he'd had dreams of becoming a part pf SEED, something more realistic than SOLDIER and-
That was it. He had no other memories of then. He might remember any half-dozen odd memories of his friends, his mentors, school, but no specifics. That was another squall, a bitter wind too bent within itself to permit anything clear.
And then the break between before and now had come. A veil had broken, a boundary had vanished, and everything had changed. A swarm of darkness, an endless swarm of moving blackness and glowing yellow eyes and oh the blood, the screaming and the crying and the dying-
But he had survived, when so many hadn't, even with a face bleeding from a Soldier's claw that got infected and didn't heal right. Him and Yuffie and Aerith and Cid and Cloud, but they lost Cloud and somehow found Traverse Town and had tried to live normally again. And he tried, so very hard to forget. It was dishonest, it was cruel, like stabbing the dead in the eye, but he'd been a child then, not old enough to understand what he was doing.
He learned to fight, been taught how to kill the Heartless. He took up the Gunblade, because it was hard to control and he knew he had to build an ironclad control to himself and his weapon (and he was lying if he didn't admit that the way the Heartless broke apart at that perfect moment between cutting and pulling the trigger made him smile like a maniac and it scared him then, not enough to make him stop) and-
And he stopped showing what he felt. He shut it down, like a clam snapping shut to protect it's vulnerable insides, grew a shell and layers of protective cyncism because he knew in his heart that the world sucked (because Heartless could be in it)and people sucked (because the Heartless wouldn't come if it wasn't for the evil in people) and everything just sucked sucked sucked. He got used to it fast, but not fast enough for people not to notice; people hate change, even if they don't if it happens so fast they go from one normal to another, and they wanted to talk about it, pull him out of 'whatever was wrong with him'.
Constantly.
All. Of. The Damned. Time.
That was when he'd taken to dismissing something he had no interest in talking about. "Whatever," in fact, ending up some sort of idiot 'catch phrase', as Yuffie put it. In fact, it was her that lead to him saying it so often it became a catch phrase.
Whatever. Time went on, and as he grew up, he just stopped caring about what he felt inside. It was almost like there two Squalls; the one that everyone saw, and a quieter one that slowly suffocated with lack of air. And then there was just one, with a grey and muted perception of the world. And that was fine. Apathy was a better comfort than self-delusion.
And then Rinoa up and died and the shell broke.
That was when he stopped letting people call him Squall and renamed himself Leon. (Ignoring Yuffie's insistence that 'Squall' sounded cooler and Cid loudly saying that he was being a Goddamned idiot for changing his name like a whiny girl.) He'd picked Leon, not because of his name, but because of Rinoa, because of some nigh-mythical standard she held him to. She always said that he was like a lion, and for the life of him, he couldn't understand why. She confused the hell out of him, and even the memory of her confused him. She gave him his necklace, the lion's-head-over-a-cross he named Griever, and in a way, renaming himself after the ridiculous thing she believed he was felt like a way of keeping her alive, just like the way he put her favorite angel's wings design on the back of his jacket and had drilled into his shoulder's-
Aerith hadn't been happy about that one. Yuffie thought it looked cool.
So he kept going. Some days, more often than not, he kept himself away at nights, eyes half-open and sour, hating the world for being insensitive, finding it hard to care about the people he knew that weren't dead. Other days, something of Rinoa infected him like a virus, forcing him to hope that maybe someday things might get better, that they might be able to reclaim the home they'd lost, even if the people were ever going to come back, barring some sort of insane miracle.
And now, that hope had come, in the form of a boy named Sora with the gleaming miracle that was the Keyblade. He was everything Rinoa had ever hoped for, had continually insisted on, and now that she seemed right after all, Leon couldn't do anything but serve as his mentor, guide him towards what had to be done and hope that he had what it took to end the nightmare that had taken their homes from them.
Maybe then, he could start calling himself Squall again.