A/N: Kingdom Hearts and its characters (c) Square-Enix & Disney. This piece is not intended to be an exposition on a theory regarding the exclusion of a certain beloved world from KH2. Fic revolves heavily around OCs, though there are substantial references to the Hollow Bastion group and Sora, Donald and Goofy. Enjoy.

The Last Inhabitant

Kingdom Hearts

On some nights, when everyone was freer than usual, they sat down and told stories to each other. They didn't sit around a fire or anything. They gathered around rickety tables with rickety chairs for their counterparts and tried, to no avail, to blow out the magical candles on the tabletops. Not all wished to tell, and not everyone who wished to tell wanted just anyone to hear; but because there were so few of them in the first place, everyone managed to hear everyone. Sometimes they even managed to prise replies out of the cold, stoic one with that scar across his brow and his strange quirk of preferring to stand instead of sit – even when there were so many seats around. And there were always empty seats available.

The perky one, Yuffie – she was always making fun of him for it. She made fun of him for everything, really – and it did seem as though she would be the only person to ever be able to get away with it. It didn't take a genius to understand Leon's perpetual anxiety, though. He never felt right sitting, or sleeping, or resting – he could not bring himself to participate in any activity that didn't exactly qualify as 'productive'. Guilt, conscience, grief… it compelled him to prowl the streets every night, searching for remnant Heartless enemies to banish to the world beyond.

They all had their ways.

That one night, everyone was talking about Loss.

"All of my pictures flew right out the window," Daniel said. He was the boy who designed the postcards. "My canvases split in two. My floor was a mish-mash of colours when everything overturned. I lost my entire body of art."

"I lost my whole herd of Emus. I loved them, stupid as they were. Every one of them." Round, jolly Bates.

"I lost my wife."

Estel didn't have to glance in his direction or feel the coils of smoke from his pipe to know who the speaker in question was. Cid was fingering some Gummi artifact or screw or whatever in his hands and it was almost surprising that he hadn't mentioned the loss of, say, his 100-strong Gummi fleet. Or the destruction of all his computer and computer laboratories. Whatever 'computers' really were. And Estel felt a sudden, unprecedented surge of warmth towards the gruff, tough-speaking engineer, though in truth they had only spoken once or twice.

Aerith, calmly, almost hypnotically, mentioned about how she had to watch her gardens and personal library burn. Yuffie said she couldn't remember much at all. Lucky girl. Not so lucky if there had been traumatic memories, and they were merely repressed. Leon, as usual, never said a word. Estel knew he'd lost his name.

When it came to talking about Loss, the word 'everything' was on their minds, but no one said it. There was no need to.

--

One night, they talked about their home-worlds.

"I come from a land of stones," Jac said. He had long, fair hair and quiet gray eyes. He wasn't very young. But none of them were anymore, really. "They were of so many colours. We made everything out of them. We had sculptures everywhere, and sometimes it became hard to tell which were the humans and which were the statues… We mined, and we wore our hills down to their roots. We were an island, ringed by eight great stone Pillars, and beyond that there was nothing else but sea."

Naturally it was Estel's turn next, for she sat right next to him, as always. She gazed into the small, magical flame dancing about lightly on the candle before her, as though she drew inspiration from their vibrant depths. "I was from a land of Magic-users," she said, her voice steady and firm. "All of us had the ability for Magic. We grew up with it, learnt it, mastered it; it was in our language, our symbols, our structures… We shared the country with lots of strange, miniature magical creatures. We lived alongside them in perfect harmony, and we studied them, learnt from them, absorbing and harnessing their magical abilities. And there were so many of them. We found new, wonderful species every year."

Estel paused slightly; there was a faded smile on her face when she continued.

"And the skies… they were incredible. I never knew night or day until I came here. We never had any such thing. The heavens were eternally splashed with myriads of surprising colours. It could be green-and-pink one day and angry-red the next. We had so many books written about the 'mood' of the skies, and there was an ongoing debate about whether studying the skies was a philosophical art or a science… My grandpa said..."

She checked herself in time, realizing that she had said more than she had planned to. Everyone was hanging onto her every word, but that didn't give her the right to ramble, to talk about her own home as if it was the only one, as if nobody else had lost his… Though, bewilderingly, she wanted to. She hadn't thought she was capable of talking about this, this home-country of hers which had crumbled before her eyes – but it had happened.

"My grandpa was a sky- scholar," she finished, quickly.

She passed the baton to Aerith, who related tales of Hollow Bastion in her usual quietly-amicable manner. Like Estel, Aerith had only meant to relate the bare minimum. But Yuffie, excited about tales regarding the home-world she had never really known, kept on prodding, while Cid corrected, interjected or added on; and in this way the cool evening turned into a presentation on the ins and outs of Hollow Bastion. Estel saw how Leon left quietly by the back door in the middle of it all, and how nobody else really seemed to notice it, least of all Yuffie. The ninja was transfixed, though Estel was sure she had heard many of those stories many times before.

--

Somehow, the arrival of the town's latest prominent figure coincided with the resurgence of Heartless armies all over town. Estel, as an astute observer of people and the daily goings-on of the community, found it incredulous that no one blamed anyone or grinded his teeth. In fact, everyone was smiling more than ever. Very few people actually understood the Keyblade Master's story, but there was some new kind of hope shining out of everyone that puzzled Estel. She told this to Jac, who gave her a wry smile and asked if she had met the Keyblade Master face-to-face yet.

So one day Estel found the Keyblade Master hovering around the café, peering up at the treasure chest lodged high up on a shelf with a characteristically childlike, eager gaze. She dropped him a few hints, and was surprised to feel her mouth twitch and her heart grow warm when the lid sprang open with a flourish and he turned to thank her, grin wide and innocent eyes a-dancing.

After that she saw him very often. The child came often to visit the moogles and their synthesizing shop, where she and Jac spent quite a bit of time at. They were the same, almost inseparable, she and Jac – both of them had arrived to realize that they were the only ones who were absolutely alone – and that naturally drew them to each other. The little room where the moogles worked was the nearest thing to their home-worlds for both of them; Jac studied the stones and artifacts and crafts that the moogles worked, and Estel studied the moogles. They had long, quiet conversations between themselves and the fairy creatures, which were only interrupted on occasion by the loud, excited footsteps of Sora and his companions thundering up the stairs.

One day Estel told Jac that she was jealous of many things. Estel was jealous of the Hollow Bastion gang. (She didn't need to explain why. He knew. Their companionship had developed to an almost telepathic extent.) Yuffie, Squall, Aerith and Cid… They were the nearest thing to a family in their little town. They had not only a common grief but a common past. It was unfair… unfair that they had each other while others had no one.

And Estel was jealous of Sora, too. To this Jac said, wryly, "It's kind of demeaning to ourselves when we so easily assume the conviction that optimism declines with age, isn't it?"

Life for Estel in the quaint little First District was beginning to take on a kind of monotony. But it was a pleasurable kind of monotony. Estel found herself lying in bed thinking and planning ahead – not just days and weeks but also months ahead. She continued to take the Dalmatians out for walks, learn flower-arrangement from Aerith and earned a living babysitting the little infant from next door… it wasn't until she broke into a long, loud laugh at Sora and Donald's b up in the attic one day that she realized her face hadn't completely become stone after all.

She hadn't believed, until now, that life went on.

--

"Her?"

There was a pause as Cid swung away from the rest o the crowd in the room and puffed a significantly-sized smoke ring into the air.

"…She was a troublemaker," Cid spoke at length. "I was yellin' at her all the time."

A long silence greeted his words. That was only partly because nobody could decide straightaway who was to speak next, since he sat right next to the fireplace, but mostly because he had brought on a most awkward atmosphere once again. The night's topic was 'Love', and it wasn't an easy subject to begin with. The group had the Keyblade Master himself to thank for this particular topic. Goofy and Donald had been teasing him silly about the arrival of a girl named Kairi, and after a couple of hastily-uttered lines of explanation, an abashed, blushing Sora escaped into the night (his companions trailing him, of course)… There were the happier and more light-hearted sharings, of course – Bates and Marie related their eventful romance, while Daniel and the bookworm from next door flirted outrageously through the evening. But like the night of the Loss, most of the participants, like Cid, had something weighing heavily on their minds. Leon had left within three minutes of the discussion, leaving behind a knowing Aerith and a curiously somber-looking Yuffie.

Estel herself was praying hard that everyone would decide to return home before the baton got round to them -

…but, alas, it was not to be.

The question was now posed to Jac. Beside him, Estel refused to meet his gaze; she stared resolutely down at her lap. She could feel the tension drawn through him and the poignant uncertainty that was slowly building up within his frame. He refused, but of course that only made everyone present more eager, more goading, and at length he had no choice but to relent. And after a torturous silence Estel heard every one of his words, quiet and steady, as a tiny piercing to her heart.

"There is someone I love… She is intelligent and industrious, and she is full of pain. I can hear the things she doesn't say. But not all. And I want to hear it all. I would wait a thousand years to hear everything. She is scared and brave and beautiful, this woman I love… I'll tell her… someday."

His last line threw many off, but not all.

Estel did not meet anyone's gaze, but knew, with a kind of transcendental awareness, that the gazes of the more-perceptive were on her. And now that it was her turn, they were expecting a reply from her. Estel for her part felt completely numb. She had always known it – somewhere in the back of her mind, subconsciously, she had always known. She felt numb and breathless and a ringing of multiple sensations, all at the same time.

She focused on the pain. She raised her chin, looked out over the heads of her audience, fixed her gaze unwaveringly on the window, on the night that offered to her her only chance of respite, and gave her reply.

"When I was twenty-two, I was engaged to be married to the son of someone my father had known for years. We didn't know each other yet, but… he was wonderful… the cheeriest person I had ever met. He was optimistic about the impending marriage, scared as I was, and… he comforted me… we fell in love for real, despite it all. We were married for two months, and blissfully happy, and… then the Heartless came. They killed him."

Her trembling fists closed upon themselves; her eyes stung.

"I loved him once. I'll love him forever."

Her words were a spirit-dampener to almost everyone present, and before long the session ended, with people were slowly getting up and leaving, retiring for the night. Estel was one of the first few out the door, and Jac plodded closely behind. They stood placidly under the moon, all alone in the town square with an intangible wall sprung up between them.

The seconds ticked past and Jac broke it. "I am not sorry about what I said." He looked off into the distance. "I meant every word."

"So did I," Estel replied, solemnly, sadly.

And then, inexplicably, the bell began to toll. Long and loud. Nobody had ever heard the bell in the town toll. All heads whipped towards the large, looming bell tower on the far edge of town. It continued to toll, and the epic aurality was like a marker, setting their words in stone, pinning down the two figures on the street as a promise for all eternity.

--

The first sign, or omen, if you will, of the impending inevitable was the departure of the Hollow Bastion team from the town. Estel arrived, with her arms full of baby and sunflower seeds, just in time to stop and stare as Aerith, Yuffie and Leon clambered into a huge flamboyantly-coloured contraption on the verge of taking off. The farewells were exchanged in a hurry and even as the ship lifted off into the sky, Estel had had no time to register any sense of loss. Blinking, she turned to her right and found Cid smoking his pipe and leaning against the wall. He said,

"I still have things to do here."

Estel didn't understand, but she knew better than to ask. The next few days were a flurry of activity, not just for Sora and company but for all the rest of the town's inhabitants. There was a strange new tension in the air, a curious, definite tinge of excitement in the town's atmosphere.

And then finally the inevitable arrived. One night an insomniac Estel turned on her side in bed to notice something glowing in the corner of her tiny room. The glow was emitted from one of her prized little pictures – the one of 'skies' that she had commissioned Daniel the artist to paint. The glow was expanding and lengthening and it enlarged, along the wall, so that there was no doubt whatsoever as to what it finally represented.

It was a door.

An involuntary shudder came over Estel. She picked up her things, dressed and headed out of the house. She could hear lots of commotion within the town square. She found herself walking into an alley and then chanced upon Cid himself, about to walk slowly and sedately into the nearest wall.

Estel shouted his name and he stopped. He turned and she could see him trying to remember her name. "What's the matter, lass?" he said at last.

"I'm no lass," Estel replied. "I had a husband and I lost him, like you lost your wife." Fiercely, she added, "She's gone, she won't be… there anymore."

He contemplated her for a long moment. "I know. Th' little punk, Sora, he did his job, though. And it's time for me to finish mine. Take care, Estel," he added, finally remembering her name. Then, with a slight wave, Cid the engineer walked into the wall, into his Door that was not meant for her, that she could not see.

He was gone.

Estel stared at the empty space in which he had been only two seconds earlier for a long while. All around her, the noises grew. All about her, people were rising from their beds and shuffling out of doors in their slippers and unkempt hair, talking loudly in excited voices, laughing and crying at the same time. The streets, previously deserted, began to fill with people.

All of a sudden Estel found it hard to breathe. She began jostling her way through the streets towards the town square, a new frenzy taking over her mind and steps, searching desperately, almost hopelessly, for someone whose name she found she could not quite bear to voice right now. She swept past people tugging at her sleeves, calling out to her; she became blind to all the activity around her until, finally, in a burst of trepidation, she felt that familiar touch at her elbow –

She turned, found herself looking into a pair of dear, soft, gray, familiar eyes. Something in her broke then. There were no tears, no fuss. All Estel did was quietly and unassumingly put herself into Jac's arms. She clung fast to him. They did not want to let go of each other.

Their embrace said it all to the knowing eyes of the townspeople. They milled around them, patted them on their shoulders and backs, said goodbye. Estel was still holding onto Jac when she shook hands with Bates, felt the final lick of a Dalmatian's tongue and nuzzled cheeks for the last time with the baby she'd never had. No one congratulated them – how could they? Only a few hours earlier, things would have been so very different. But now… it was time to go.

--

The number of people left in the town was dwindling. One by one, people were walking away, leaving forever through the portals that only they themselves could see. There were mysterious, muffled crashing sounds in the background, from seemingly a very long distance away. The town square was nearly empty. And Estel was still speaking.

"It's not fair. I thought I would never cry again. I thought I had used up a lifetime's supply of tears. And then perhaps I did not admit it, even then, to myself. I thought, too, that I would never have reason to cry again because now I had a new life. Here. But it's all gone. We could have so much time together, you and I. Only… I was foolish. No. This is not fair. Look at me now. Was it a lie? An illusion? I believed in eternity here. I believed in immortality. And it's all gone. Did we sit up here in the Moogles' attic all those hours for nothing? Did we gather around at the café all those nights for nothing? Did I care for the flowers and the Dalmatians and the baby for nothing? Did I live for nothing? I have been cheated. Twice. I have had enough."

He touched her tears, as if to say, Do not be ashamed of them. He said, "We were a real place. A real community. All of us. Don't ever doubt that."

There were no more voices. Only theirs. The town square was empty now.

"Maybe… we don't have to leave. I don't want to go back, Jac. All that I loved there is gone. There is nothing there anymore. There is only here and now, and Fate is taking even that from me. Shall we stay, Jac? Oh, we could live together and have fat, merry babies. We would be Adam and Eve of a new civilization, and if the worlds fail once more, we'll have Everything all over again." Her cheeks were tinged with pink as she said it; Jac loved it, loved the colour in her usually pale face. And even as she spoke the words she knew, deep in her heart, how impossible it was. She was laughing a laugh that was not a laugh. "We could stay here, forever and ever and ever."

He raised a hand, pointed into the distance. "See, Estel?" he said, quietly. "Those buildings… they're receding into the horizon. They're gone. The town is waiting for us, Estel… the whole town. We can't stay."

She looked and realized that it was true.

"Traverse Town," she whispered.

"Traverse Town," he echoed.

They locked hands and gazed off into the horizon for a long while, where instead of night-sky and the outline of quaint houses they began to see the universe.

She turned to him, You go first.

One last touch. One last look. He obeyed.

Estel made herself watch until he was gone. I loved him once. I'll love him forever.

One last inhabitant.

There hadn't been any need for promises and vows. They both knew that they would never forget. And perhaps the world they had lived in was one that was never meant to last. It was an enigmatic world that had been created out of destruction, an unstable, temporal space of jigsaw puzzles and refugees scared to arrive and afraid to leave. But there had been eternity here, and there had been love, and Traverse Town would continue to exist as long as they remembered, because if it had not existed they would never have met. Traverse Town had been born for them.

He had said she was 'scared and brave and beautiful'.

There was only the town square left. She turned, towards the Door that glowed so brightly just a few feet away. She squared her shoulders, willing herself to be strong. If she peered closely enough perhaps she could see pink-and-green streaks of sky peering out at her from beyond.

Estel took a deep breath and stepped forward.

fin.