Disclaimer: Kingdom Hearts and all its characters fall under the ownership of Disney and Square Enix. I make no profit off this work of fiction.
Spoilers: If you're a third of the way through Days, you're good.
Timeline: Sometime shortly before Xion's first run in with Riku.
Notes: The Disney world being referred to is based on the somewhat lesser-known, but nevertheless amazing Hans Christian Andersen short story-turned-Disney short known as The Little Matchgirl. I suggest looking it up before reading this – or even if you're not going to read this at all, because it's phenomenally beautiful.
It was the little things in this world that stood out the most. The things Xion took the greatest pains to remember.
It was the smoke rising from tall buildings, the tightly packed houses with latticed windows. The smell of samovar tea, spiced pryanik, and kissel. It was the clatter of boots and voices and horse hooves muffled down to a mere crunch of snow. The way everything seemed to come in shades of gray, from white to silver.
But mostly, it was the unfamiliarity of it all.
She had never touched upon this place before, neither in waking hours or in dreams. And that could mean only one thing; neither had he.
The boy in red, the one with brown hair and eyes like the sea, was as much of a stranger to this world as she was – and that very prospect filled Xion with both elation and inexplicable unease. As though veering away from his phantom path was somehow forbidden in the same way climbing the inner stairways of the clocktower was, when they opened the doors with both keyblades and breezed past the "Danger! No unauthorized entry beyond this point" signs on the way to the tower's edge.
It wasn't often that missions were assigned to the fringe worlds, as they were collectively known. That was why they were considered fringe; places like Sleepy Hollow, Montressor, Nottingham. Like Fantasia, Demyx's favorite secret retreat, or the world of cobblestone streets where mice were said to come out and talk.
Locales that had long been crossed off the Organization's to-do list, for one reason or another. Low priority.
As she had been handed the recon assignment that morning, Xion could not shake the feeling that she was being deliberately pushed out of the way.
But she'd done as ordered, as though it were ever a question. Collected as much recon as possible (some sort of celebration was coming up), exterminated any lurking heartless (three, in the back of a dilapidated building), and kept an eye open for signs of more powerful heartless that may be in the area (there weren't any.) Eventually, there was nothing left to do but RTC.
By then, the brief daylight of winter was rapidly fading away as the bitter nighttime cold came in to replace it. Suddenly, the cured leather was doing little to keep out the wind, and Xion locked her arms around herself with a thin shiver, an exhale that turned to pale white fog and drifted towards the sky like a stray thought.
For the first time, the prospect of ice cream seemed like a cruel joke.
She was mentally backtracking through the city, to the dense jungle of houses and the portal that lay near them, when she heard it. A small, startled cry, just loud enough to be heard and just soft enough to ignore. Xion turned.
On the edge of the square, crouching on hands and knees where she'd stumbled into the snow, was a young girl. Very young, or at least more so than herself and Roxas, and dressed feebly in a faded cloak that rode up near her bare ankles and calves. In her hands, connected via a loop of fabric around the neck, was a wooden box, and whatever had knocked her down must have been irrelevant in the face of that overturned container, for she was scrabbling at the snow with a desperation that went far beyond numb hands.
No one stopped to help her.
No one noticed she was there.
Clutching her own cloak anxiously, Xion thought of everything she'd been taught about stealth and secrecy and not jeopardizing the mission. She imagined how Saïx would react, and it was not the coming night that wrested a shiver from her.
But she was so small, and it was so cold, and surely she wouldn't remember one face out of thousands in this city?
"Here..." Kneeling across from her, Xion felt the girl look up – incredulous, as though unsure whether she was being assisted or robbed – and didn't respond in turn as she combed through the bits of fine snow and hard chips of ice and uncovered, one by one, what had been lost. Matchsticks, long ones. Filling up her hand like straws to be drawn. Xion couldn't help but wonder if they would still be any use after lying in the snow.
The matchstick seller had stopped staring and resumed searching. Together, as the city passed them by, they collected the rest of the fallen matches in silence; trying, with short, nimble little grasps, to keep their fingers from being crushed under the feet of countless passerby. They might have been two young girls racing the setting sun to finish a game.
"I think that's all of them," Xion said, and for the first time got a good look at the little girl's face. The small stub nose, and the stray lock of wind blown hair. The dark circles beneath even darker eyes, black and brown. So unlike the eyes of the Organization members, with their blues and greens and golds. "...Are you alright?"
There was no immediate response, like maybe she couldn't, and then a terse nod. Small hands gripped the sides of the matchstick box too tightly. The lamplighters were coming around with their poles and wicks, and Xion knew she'd said too much in saying so little.
"It's...it's getting dark. I should go and let you get back home," she offered, because that's what children did, wasn't it? Normal children with hearts, like the ones in Twilight Town who ventured out during the day and returned to their families at night. But the girl didn't nod this time, eyes cast down and dark and reflecting what scant light was coming off the snow...
Someone with no emotions of their own should not have been able to pick up on what she tried so hard to hide just then. The aura of neglect. The weight of solitude. And indeed, Xion didn't comprehend all of it.
Just enough.
She knew the way her own day was going to end, just as it always did. That she was going back home to sit on the clock tower with the sun warming her back, to eat ice cream and breathe in the sea and hear Roxas talk about his mission to the Beast's castle, how he'd nearly been caught in the hallway. Axel was going to burn his popsicle stick down to ash like he always did, flick it away, and the little girl behind her was going to sell matches in the biting cold –
She'd never been alone, not really. Not since Roxas had offered her the sun, the same way Axel had offered it to him; that bit of light they'd stumbled upon, and now called their own. Something to always count on. Time and time again, her friends had saved her.
It was the one thing this little girl needed, and Xion could not give it to her. Couldn't make fire appear from thin air, or promise something better...
"Wait," she said. The girl, who had been in the process of walking away, turned around with a look of surprise.
...but she could break the rules.
Wordlessly, she pulled her own hands free of the black leather gloves, ignoring when the wind hit her fingertips like a set of narrow teeth, and handed them over.
The matchstick girl blinked down at them several times, then tried to hand them back.
"It's alright. I can get another pair," Xion assured her, not entirely certain it was true. Evidently there was only so much protest to be made when the cold was so unforgiving, and she watched as the girl's frozen hands burrowed down into the slightly oversized garments. There was a certain expression she wore, too; one that Xion had seen only in flashes of memory, on the faces of people she'd never known.
Not joy or sorrow or anything that simple. Painful and bright and impossible.
Just what it was called, she couldn't exactly say...but for a moment, there was nothing Saïx could have said or done to make her feel ashamed.
She was just beginning to say a good-bye, unsure and slightly awkward, when suddenly the girl took her hand, gloved fingers slipping something into Xion's bare ones. Hurried, but insistent. Like a moment she couldn't let slip away.
Xion stared incredulously at what she'd received. This token of the girl's, and what it meant.
"You're giving this to me?" Another nod, and she said the only thing she really could. "Thank you..."
The girl gave a smile, small and relieved. Warm. Their eyes met briefly, a long second, but it was enough for something to pass between them in the last of the light. A sort of understanding.
And although it didn't change a thing, Xion smiled back.
They couldn't linger on there. The last she saw of the girl was her small frame slipping out from beneath a distant lamplight, headed for the residential district beyond. Fighting the wind that whipped at her cloak, and still clutching the box that held her livelihood.
Silent as the snow, Xion made her way through the empty streets to the portal home. Back to missions and heartless and the two people she loved best. To the world as the boy in red had seen it. Back to questions.
Braving the wind, she glanced over her shoulder at the city the Organization had pushed aside. That world of grays, silvers and endless white.
Just once.
In that city, there was a corner that the light of the lamp posts did not reach. A narrow space between three adjoining houses; a meeting of the worlds. No one ever thought to look within it...if they had, they might have noticed the shaking form of a small girl, huddled against the stones in an effort to claim some of the warmth radiating from within. On her hands, in wild contrast to her old clothing, a pair of black gloves.
On the other side of the city, at the very end of an alley, there was a gap in the fabric of the world. An open corridor to another plane. No one was there to see it...its creator had planned it that way. But if there had been, they might have seen the lonely form of a small girl, dressed all in black. And then, perhaps, they would have been able to draw near enough to see what she carried, and wonder why.
Clutched in her hands, held close as though to protect it from the darkness, was a single matchstick.
~End~