My first stream of consciousness piece. For David.
Disclaimer: I'm still pretty upset I don't own Kingdom Hearts.
He's the only one who's still awake when she drags herself in through the doorway. She watches his mouth move to ask her just what in the hell she thinks so doing walking around the city so late, to ask her if she wants to die out there, but it's like his breath leaves him when he realizes that the jagged line of blood that drips across her stomach is the vivid red of a girl's, not the inky sludge of a Heartless.
"Yuffie, how-"
She wants to tell him what happened tonight, to tell him everything she's been holding back, but she's afraid once she starts, she'll drown him in the words she's been keeping from him, (from everyone,) for the long winter they've known each other. And it's almost like he can feel what she's feeling, like he knows, and the heat in his eyes is a living, breathing thing that threatens to engulf her, swallow her up and keep her safe inside him. And it's like he's not Leon at all, anymore. Because he runs across the room to her the way Leon never would, pulling her into a hug so tight she thinks he's going to break her in half but she can't be bothered to care because at least being broken is better than being empty.
She doesn't know when she starts crying but he says he doesn't care, that it's okay, that everything will be okay. She decides that he's definitely not Leon, because Leon would never tell her it's okay to get a big ball of snot on his shirt, or let her hug him for even a tenth of a millisecond. But Squall does, rocks her back and forth in the circle of his arms until she feels herself slipping away into sleep, into darkness.
"Who did this to you?"
The question seeps under her skin and into her dreams. She wants to ask him what makes him so sure she didn't do it to herself, but she has a feeling that he already knows she didn't, couldn't. And she hates him for it.
"Please, just talk to me, Yuff."
The sound of her name on his lips breaks her in a way his hug can't, splits her heart into two halves she doesn't know what to do with. And it hurts even more than the slash across her stomach or the rubble that cut into her feet or the silent screams of her father as she watched him choke on his own blood.
It hurts because Squall doesn't deserve to hear any of this, to become as empty as she is now that her whole's world been ripped away from her, burned away by a madman with a glittering black wing on his back and a laughing, lethal sword at his side. She almost can't tell him, almost doesn't want to tell him, but she knows she'll have to tell someone soon because she'll explode into a million tiny pieces no can put back together if she keeps quiet about it for too long.
She sinks to the floor and he sinks there with her, ready to hear anything she's willing to tell him. So she tells him everything, everything from the memory of the mountain crumbling to the fire blazing to the sounds of her burning, dying people. She manages to keep her voice steady until about halfway through, and then she's crying and he shushes her sobs, murmurs that it's okay, that it's all okay, rubbing soothing circles into her back until she can almost pretend that it is. And even though it'll be springtime soon, she's cold to the deepest part of her, frozen like a flower trapped under a sheet of ice that won't thaw from the heat of the warm, white sun. His fingertips gliding over her shirt are the warmest thing she's felt in months, warmer than the tea from Aerith's kettle and the quilt from Cid's room, and she never really wants him to stop because she knows that once he does, she'll go back to feeling nothing at all again.
"I'm here. I'm always here, okay?"
There's an undeniable something in the way he says it, a something she doesn't want to think about but can't quite ignore, either, and she wishes she was pretty like Tifa or sweet like Aerith so that maybe she wouldn't have to wonder if he hates her.
They lay in the darkness for a long time, and she tries to memorize the lines of his body in the dark, the way the seared skin of her shoulder feels as it brushes against his collarbone. She took his shirt off after he took off hers, and even though he said it was only to look over the wound that runs across her stomach, she thinks there's more to it than that. The way he whispers her name against her temple makes her think there's so much more to it than the scars they wear like armor. She tries to come up with a word for this, for him, but there are no words for the way he moves against her in the dark, no names for the way his eyes ghost over the valley of her ribs and the spaces between her breasts. And even though she's almost perfectly certain that she's just as empty as the Heartless that surrounded her on the long, cold walk home, she thinks that maybe she doesn't mind being empty as long as he's by her side.
fin