Night had fallen. Leon sat on the balcony of the castle, looking out to the almost placid city below. It was funny how similar Radiant Garden looked to his old home from above. Neat streets, empty at night, filled with only the warm low form the interiors of night owl's homes, it all looked so familiar from above, when he was detached and wasn't distracted.
As time had gone by, as he stayed in the thick of it, he had become distracted by Radiant Garden's problems and inhabitants. The Heartless were and would always be an issue, darkness had lived in this very castle for too long to just disappear because one leg of the Keyblade master's journey was over and thirteen over-zealous lost souls were no more. The inhabitants were another issue altogether. He could ignore the Heartless by going on the other side of town, but the people were always there, warm, alive and inviting, all but a certain blonde swordsman with whom he had more in common than he would ever admit.
Despite their differing appearances, they were here for the same reason: their home world was no more. Most of them seemed to forget that, they seemed to not even care, or, rather, remember. They didn't feel the pang of loss Leon felt every time he remembered the ocean. They didn't have the mark of a fallen comrade to bear plainly on their face. They didn't have to change their name to mask their own shame of failure. But it happened so fast…
Leon felt the memory rush on him as if it were a floodgate letting out. i 'No,' /i he thought, i 'I can't go back.' /i
But his mind was beyond his control, and the pull bite and tug of the past was on him, around him, all-consuming. He was stretched, pulled, folded, spun in circles and left in a black shroud, a slight tingling in his limbs. He was actually afraid to move, afraid that the fine mesh of where ever he was would collapse and send him spiraling further into nothingness.
His eyes were tightly squeezed shut, brows furrowed with frustration and lack of air. After a few moments, he tried to breathe and found he could. There was no swirling smoke filling his lungs, this was a memory, and was safe. He had already lived through it; it couldn't hurt him.
"Squall!"
At the sound of his name, his old name, his eyes snapped open. Air felt as if it were socked out of him and then rushed back in. He was now officially in his memory. His last memory.
"Squall! Whatcha doin' just starin' off like that? It's RUDE."
He looked up to see the face of his old friend, smiling wide with fangs and a slight quirk in his cheek from he got frustrated, blue eyes squinted up from his cheeks, pink from activity or the sun. Leon was amazed at how clearly he could remember Zell's features.
"Whuss your problem, man?" Zell asked, his brows arching upward with concern, his bottom lip falling victim to one of his teeth. "You O.K.?"
"Whatever," It came out of his mouth so fast he didn't second-guess it. It had been years since he had said it, been years since he was the vain teenager who no one could keep thawed. It was, after all just a memory, he was passenger, not driver.
Outside his reverie, Zell clapped his hands in excitement and walked a few paces to the doorway, allowing Leon some time to get a better grip on his surroundings. It was Ma Dincht's kitchen, bathed in a warm glow from the noontime sun. But there was something different that it was when he was here last. Everything carried a sepia tone, and nothing carried the clarity Zell's face had. For that matter, the rest of Zell didn't have the same clarity; it got progressively fuzzier from his shoulders down. His hips regained a little sharpness, and his legs, too, but his feet were the worst bit. Those shoes were impossible to memorize.
But Zell's silhouette in the sunshine-y doorway was perfectly sharp every curve and fold crystal clear, his voice ringing true and echoing across the little clean slum of Balamb.
"Eh, SEIFER, git your stupid self in HERE!" Zell yelled, cupping his hands in a useless gesture to amplify his voice.
"Yeah, you're lucky I came at all, chickenwuss!" Seifer hollered back from the blurry beach a few meters away.
But Seifer came, walking with a sort of self-assured easiness Leon had always admired. His body was clearer to him than Zell's from years of observation. He felt badly that he didn't remember Zell's body that well, they had gone through a lot together during the war. During the war he was a different person, cold uncaring and selfish taking from Zell what he wanted and not sending him another glance. Zell had tried to fix him and got no success. He did have a lot more success with Seifer, though.
"Hey Ice Princess!" Seifer said cheerily, waving one arm over his head, grinning like a fool. Both Zell and Leon glared at him, Zell adding a little smack to the end as retribution, causing Seifer to sigh about the abuse he took daily from cute little chickenwusses, his eyes sliding over to Leon's in a superior 'look-what-I-have' gaze.
Seifer's face was just as clear as Zell's, every eyelash and shadow clear as a bell, the smouldering look in his eyes for what he was planning to do with Zell later, the perfect straightness of his teeth and the way his upper lip flattened on the right side when he smirked like that.
Years of practice, years of observation, years of these people for his entire life left him with this half-formed memory, a pathetic throwback to the end of his life. And he could only mouth the words and play along.
"I thought you said we were having lunch," Leon said curtly, giving Zell the cool gaze he had for years.
"Oh, YEAH, we are! Guess what is is!" Zell said excitedly, his eyes shining with promise.
"Hotdogs." Seifer said dryly, taking a seat at the fuzzy table that seemed to be constantly changing colors. Leon couldn't, for the life of him, remember what color Ma Dincht's table was, or even how high it was. But it didn't matter anyway.
"No, ASSHOLE, I CAN cook somethin' 'sides that, ya know." Zell said without any ferocity, giving Seifer a 'be-careful-what-you-say' look he most certainly had stolen from his mother. "Anyways, as I was SAYING before I was INTERRUPTED was--"
Just then the sky ripped open and split into a thousand pieces, crumbling into a swirling sepia and blue clutter on the ocean's horizon, that was rapidly folding in on itself. Leon froze. i 'This is it,' /i he thought rapidly, i 'Balamb's final hour'. /i
There was a roar of air and smoke, the air thinning ad the smoke gaining. The room melted away like sand, leaving the rapidly changing figures of his two friends behind. He felt himself stretch and Compress, he felt the weight of a thousand strings of possibility run off of him and a thousand pounds of the past flattening him. He saw Zell's pale, frightened face across from him, clutching Seifer's hand. He head Seifer's voice yelling to hold on, his mouth varying wildly from wide-open to inexplicably small, his tone maintaining its dull quality in comparison to the sharp bellow of what was happening around him.
Leon watched as Zell and Seifer got closer together, he watched as they made one last desperate movement towards each other, a final soft kiss, a crush of their bodies and Zell was ripped away and compressed further along the stream. He watched as Seifer's face contorted not just from time, but from loss and grief and then made a grab for him, as to pull him from falling into the stream as well and--
Suddenly as it began, it stopped.
The world was over.
His life had ended.
And Radiant Garden came back into clearer focus; the midnight sky bursting forth an array of hues blue purple and somewhere along a cluster of stars was a band of heliotrope. The sleepy little town underneath him, filled with people just like him, perhaps more forgetful, rested on, the glow from a few select homes more dim than before. He was back in the now. He was what he had become.
Silence came over everything, a relief to his tired ears. It was warm and muggy, the good kind that felt like a blanket almost, but not quite, suffocating you in its embrace. Leon knew he couldn't do that to himself any longer. There was nothing more he could have done. If he were to live, it would have to be in the here and now, not the there and the then. But he was a different person than the child he was then.
Squall was dead.
He was Leon.