He wasn't a bad person, really. Dilan definitely wasn't. Xaldin, he later put it delicately, was…misguided, for lack of a better term. As evidence, he pointed out the contrasts between their hair: Dilan's carefully sheared fuzz and Xaldin's wild matted dreadlocks. Deeply involved in the negotiation from one style to the next was his loss of a heart. How could he care about the well-being of others when he could not even muster up the wish to care for his own hygiene? (His desperate fight for survival as the Keyblade drove into him one too many times destroyed the basis of this argument. Xaldin asked calmly that the objector please go fall into a piranha-infested well.)
So he was at first confused when he found Naminé. It wasn't as if he could attribute it to her being the first one he re-met after they all died. He had had to, grudgingly, give that honor to Marluxia. And he certainly hadn't cried upon finding he still-eccentric gardener. May his sentient roses and pitcher plants dehydrate.
But the girl, still wearing a white dress, though perhaps not as skimpy as the one he had known her to wear before, had tackled him today. She looked the same. She sounded the same. "Xaldin."
"Naminé," he acknowledged.
She paused, blond hair glistening with sweat in stick strands. He was vividly aware of the uncomfortable summer day heat pooling liquid where her tiny body pressed against his considerably larger one. Her arms locked tightly around his waist, hands barely able to find each other. He could not see her face without tucking his chin firmly into his throat. "I missed you," she mumbled.
"I find that rather hard to believe."
He didn't know how many other people from their past life she had found. Maybe he was the first, maybe one of the last. But he did know that he was one of the many who had treated her badly, to understate the fact.
"I did. I missed all of you. I wasn't an angel either before," she added. "They called me a witch for a reason."
"It wasn't a particularly justifying reason, as I recall."
Naminé pushed back and met his gaze serenely with those pale blue eyes. "We didn't know any better." And she began sobbing.
He didn't know he had joined her until a hiccup caught in his throat and made his gasp for breath. They sank down in the middle of the sidewalk, still holding on to each other. Let others think what they would. A grown burly man and washed-out girl, crying their hearts out.