A/N: This is an attempt. An attempt to explain the age discrepancies between two people in Kingdom Hearts. ...It is a very messed-up, utterly weird attempt.
In fact, it is officially one of the strangest, fluffy-happy-sappy,
likely out-of-character(or maybe not so out-of-character; the man supposedly
wibbled and fretted over puppies. >.>), weird things I've ever written.
I wrote this on very little sleep, which is probably why it reads like
it was written by someone who was either drunk, high, or both. XD But I
should probably shut up now.
strange vision
It had been nine years already. And counting.
The patrol had become routine for the young man now; sweep the city, check for new arrivals and dispose of any threats that arose. The influx of new arrivals had not waned any in the past year-- if anything, it had grown-- and though he was no mediator, he knew enough (and had had enough practice) to know how to get it through their heads that they weren't in Kansas anymore.
And with some confused people, a sharp "Shut up, stand up, and follow me," seemed to work just fine.
This patrol wasn't supposed to be different from any of the rest. He'd managed to keep himself impersonal for so long that he'd almost stopped hurting. He was excellent at building walls against emotion, after all, and he was almost done with this one.
Sometimes, though, he would sit alone during the day, armed with a pencil which absently traced the images of lost friends on paper. All of the drawings found their way to the trash one way or another, but he could not keep himself from drawing them; almost as if he were hoping he could breathe life into the black lines and make his friends come back.
Sometimes he still lay alone at night, fingering the angelic crimson stitching that spread across the back of his jacket and imagining the scent of flowers and angel wings in the dark. But he was quickly beginning to realize that it was best to think of the delicate, fanciful image only as a symbol of a memory, and not as a painful reminder.
It was that jacket that hung from his shoulders right now, chased with images of his past; it was a blade heavy with memory that sloped alongside him. Inperviousness to the pain brought by remembrance did not mean that one could not still remember.
Turning a corner, his steps faltered as he spotted a small figure lying curled on the ground. It looked like a young girl who couldn't be older than nine; by all appearances harmless, but appearances were deceptive in a world like this. He thought of drawing his weapon, wondering if it might frighten her, then decided that he could take no chances.
She stirred at the leather-metal sounds he made as he drew near, her chest rising and taking in the foreign air. Sitting up, she half-turned towards him, staring at him in a mixture of bewilderment, confusion and fear.
It was the eyes that stopped him in his tracks; lovely eyes, green as the field he still dreamed about at night. It was the familiar face, whose lines he had traced countless times with pencil on paper, that made his breath catch in his throat.
It is a myth of this world that when a soul dies before its time, it is reborn far away in a different world.
He could remember the day she was taken from them, back when his world still existed. It wasn't supposed to be a hard mission, it wasn't supposed to end the way it did.
The silence was complete and eerie; the rebels hidden away in their makeshift base. The soldiers waited like sentinels opposite the haphazard defenses of the rebellion, and the mercenaries were sent across to perform the assassination they'd been contracted to do.
That was why he'd decided only the two of them had to go. He had never anticipated what happened next. She wasn't supposed to have ended that way. Nobody should have to end that way.
She was screaming and it was his fault. There had been a field of land mines laid that he didn't know about, and that was his fault too. Her entire torso was ravaged and coming undone, and that was also his fault. Everything was his fault.
All he could think of at that point was of the perfection, the person he'd ruined, of what he could have done to prevent this and why he hadn't done those things.
He was numb as he went to her side. She was straining and moaning against the pain, her hands moving blindly and aimlessly over the raw ruin of her front, her voice begging him to end it, to stop the pain, to kill her.
All his training told him to simply slit her throat and move on to complete the mission; everything he'd been taught cried for him to stop staring and do something, anything. But all his feelings conflicted between the desire to end her suffering and the rising realization that if he survived this, he would have to face the others and explain to them why he had come back alone, while she lay rotting in a mass grave: forgotten and derelict.
His hands were shaking as he drew his weapon. His hands had been taught to kill before the mind realized that death was permanent, and still they faltered. She was crying for him to hurry, and he knew he was failing her just by tarrying so long. A spell of healing could not possibly fix wounds of such magnitude. Both of them knew there was no other option.
In the end he lost his nerve. It was a Death spell that his hands moved to bring her, not the cool steel of his blade.
Death always made his hands go cold, and he slipped his right glove off to touch the pale skin of her throat with his bare hand. Black light pulsed from the tips of his fingers-- deceptively soft-edged and feathered for the results they brought-- and he took her throat gently in his hand. Direct contact was the gentlest way to cast the Death spell; no sickles flashed to eviscerate, no claws sought to rip the life from the target. Instead, it was more like a draw; the caster drawing the life from the victim.
The Death spell always brought a heady euphoria with it that was grossly inappropriate for what it was supposed to do. The euphoria was the result of the life of the victim streaming through the caster before being whipped off on the wind. He felt a surge of fierce warmth race through him, and it looked like emeraldgreen and auburn and sun-yellow and kind smiles, smelled like soap and cinnamon and perfume, sounded like distant music and chiming laughter and the purling of waves on the sand.
And that was the end of that.
But he never had to face the others, a fact that was both a relief and another source of guilt. The world ended before he got the chance.
And now here she was again, a second chance barely a day older than nine; tiny and fragile for her age. He thought he could almost smell the lingering blood in the air before he reminded himself that it was guilt that made him taste that shroud of copper in the air.
She shrank back as he approached, and he wondered briefly if memory extended through from life to life. That thought was cancelled as soon as she asked in that familiar, clear voice: "Who... are you? Where am I?"
He paused then. He could have chalked her lack of recognition up to his being nine years older; he was taller, and with longer hair than he had had at seventeen. But he knew it was far more likely that she simply didn't remember him at all.
"...I'm Leon." Looking into those eyes reawoke the instinct to call himself Squall, an instinct he suppressed.
Sheathing his gunblade to put her more at ease, he knelt beside her, slipping off his glove and reaching out towards her. Immediately she shrank back even further, avoiding his supplicant hand. It seemed almost like a reflex, a quick gesture that she didn't even appear to notice.
Leon was not surprised. The last time he had reached out to touch her, it had been with Death writhing about his hand.
Putting his glove back on, he reached out again. This time she took his hand with the trusting confidence of a girl too young to realize that strangers should not be so readily trusted. Or perhaps her ease was another natural reaction to him. "I'm Selphie," she said to him solemnly as they straightened up. "Will you take me home?"
Leon stared down at her, unsure of how to answer. He was suddenly keenly aware of how small her hand was within his own, how tiny she looked beside him. Now that he looked at her, he found himself able to remember fragments of his own past. She looked exactly as Squall remembered her from the Orphanage; small and fragile, innocent yet almost tomboyish. This wasn't the grown-up Selphie he remembered, who could take care of herself and a load of other people to boot; this was a little girl Selphie, who still needed others to take care of her. "Where is your home?"
"The islands. It got dark one day, and I couldn't find anyone or anything and it was quiet for a long time, and then I was here. It doesn't look like islands here. Will you take me home?" Her green eyes stared up at him pleadingly, as if sensing his trepidation.
Leon tore his gaze away from hers. The same islands as Sora? ...They are gone.
"I can't take you home, Selphie," Leon said, kneeling again beside her and awkwardly stroking her hair back with a gentleness that could only rarely be coaxed from him. "You won't be able to go back." Selphie looked puzzled, and a little lost, but she didn't look significantly devastated; which likely meant she had had no parents or family to return to. Aerith might have scolded him for being so honest with a child, but from what little he remembered, he knew Selphie could deal with the truth. "Did you have parents?"
"No..." Selphie recited this as though this were something to be ashamed of. "Not since I was very little." She paused a minute, cocking her head at him in an achingly familiar way. "I feel like I know you. ...Will you take me home?"
Leon cocked his head at her; didn't she realize that he couldn't do that? "Selphie, I can't-"
"No," she interrupted in that patient tone that he remembered all too well. It was the tone Selphie took when she felt that you were being obtuse. "Take me home with you."
Leon circled his arm around her, laid his hand against her as if to assure himself that she was real; it spread easily over nearly a third of her small, delicate back. He could feel the fragile backbone snaking beneath his fingers. "Take you home?"
"I feel like I knew you before," she repeated insistently, before pressing herself against him and burying her face in his shoulder; the gesture of a lost, afraid child clinging to the only familiar thing in the world. Even if the familiar thing was only a remnant of a memory from another life. "I never had a daddy. Will you be my daddy?"
Leon stiffened only a moment in surprise, before he relaxed into her, his arms lacing around her. "Yes." And take care of you, as I failed to before.
Selphie smiled as Leon picked her up and took her home.