I finally finished Kingdom Hearts (I've had it for I don't know how long, but I haven't had time to play) and suddenly a million ideas sprouted in my mind. This was one of them. Expect some more KH-fic from me in the coming weeks (months?).

Disclaimer: I own none of the characters or place-names that appear herein; they are the property of Square-Enix and Disney, and I am taking no financial gain from this work of fiction.

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"I will not use my real name until this world is saved." - Leon, Kingdom Hearts.

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Darkness closing in like the maw of a titanic wolf around them, swallowing candlelight and glass. It rolled in, impossible wide and tall and all-consuming, in a lazy wave crashing against the shore that was their home. Tentacle-arms of blackness tinged with sickly purple clawed its way up the walls with a slow but steady pace, and the panic began to spread – nothing they did was ever enough, and the eyes in the darkness multiplied.

Yellow wick-lights glinted from every corner, watched him wherever he turned, and they hungered for something he had, but he did not know what and even if he did he would not give it to them. It began in the bowels of the castle, in the very roots of their world, and it crawled like a nightmare higher and higher. Together with everyone else, he retreated higher and higher into the towers, but his heart broke a little more with every floor they were forced to abandon.

A room so small that if he should move, his feet would brush against the walls, and Yuffie – seven years old and made of knees and elbows and soup plate eyes – was shivering in the middle of the bed, arms wrapped around her legs in a child's defence against the nightfrights. No child should have to defend herself from something like this, not when the nightmares spilled over into day and became real, and though his hands were shaking like the leaves on an autumn tree, he stood straight-backed facing the rattling door.

Shadows with eyes and searching fingers shook the door-handle with a single-minded determination, searching for a way into the room, in to them to make them disappear just like he had seen so many others do. Just like the darkness had taken so many others – his parents, Yuffie's, anyone who fell behind...

"Yuffie!" the scream like a wounded animal, and though the call is not for him he turns around and sees the two of them – a child with tears streaming down her cheeks, driven half-insane by the fear, and a man he remembers as tall and imposing now on his knees – the shadows snapping at their heels.

"Yuffie! Run! - " the man makes a desperate attempt to free himself and tries to make the child run at the same time, and he fails. "Help us! Someone – please! - help her!"

It is not will that makes him turn back; it is instinct and reflex – in his mind's eye he sees another girl, so alike and yet so different – and his boots beat with echoes on the stone floor. It is but the work of a second to catch hold of the child's sticks-and-skin body and he stumbled backwards, away from the darkness he knows is more dangerous than he can take. Right in front of his eyes the shadows with their claws and invisible teeth rise like a cloud around the man and the last he hears as he turns around to run – the child clinging to him and screaming, a sound that breaks his heart – is the chilling scream of a dying man.

All he had between himself and the shadows beyond the doorway was the frail wood of the door and the brittle, old metal of the last sword left in the storage. All between the door and Yuffie was his body, his fading strength, but he would not give up now, he would not die in this unworthy place.

The hinges of the door creaked, slowly giving way beneath the weight of darkness, and he took a step back against his will, the backs of his knees hitting the edge of the bed. Then, a frail, shivering moment of silence, of stillness, as Yuffie crawled up behind him and small hands caught to the back of his jacket and his grip on the sword weakened for but one moment, before the hinges broke and the darkness came pouring in through the doorway in a large black mass of shadows and yellow eyes.

The blade moved, snicker-snack, in a beginner's unpractised swings, and though it hit the darkness with the wet sound of metal on rotting wood it was less effective than he would have wanted it to. Yuffie's arms wound around his arms and neck like a desperate starfish and he stumbled back again, falling on the bed and rolling as quickly as he could, wincing as the shadows came crawling after him and Yuffie screamed again as his weight nearly crushed her – seventeen-year-old boys were never supposed to fall on seven-year-old girls, not even when it was the choice between death or disappearance.

The last he heard this time was the sound of the swishing shadows and a door slamming open, the echoing footsteps across the floor even as the brittle blade in his hand shattered and was eaten by the darkness. The last thing he felt was a hand grabbing the back of his jacket, and then the darkness of unconsciousness took over.

The light, flickering like a candle in the wind, just out of reach. With a sleepwalker's slowness he reached for it, brow furrowing as it darted away again. If he reached just a little further...

...the light became the sharp yellow-white of a lamp and he squinted; the thundering headache screamed in protest of his mind having been awakened, and sleep was reluctant to give up its grip on him. Yet there was a little hope; lamplight meant that he was still alive because he could not imagine that there would be something as mundane and annoying as headaches in the hereafter.

"...Squall? Can you hear me, Squall?"

Aerith? A face crowned with brown hair and a pink bow swam into view, and now there was no doubt; only Aerith would ever keep neat under the brunt of an attack like this. He blinked, trying to get his eyes used to the light again, and the face above him smiled in the way only Aerith could.

"You're finally awake – Cid didn't think you would wake up again," she said, and now his gaze focused and he could see her clearly. "How are you feeling?"

His initial thought of neatness had been slightly off-mark; even in the proper face of Aerith there were traces of weariness and her pretty-in-pink dress was torn and singed. The hard surface beneath him could only be a table, and the shadows of bookcases behind his pink-clad awakener told him he had somehow ended up in the library.

"I'm... fine," he belatedly answered her question as he pushed himself up into a sitting position and looked around.

All around him were gathered the survivors, worn faces and soot-covered hands clinging to the hilts of swords and spears and anything else at hand to ward of the shadows. There was Cid, the ever-present cigarette now only a smoking stump, there was the librarian, spectacles broken and hair ruffled, and there was Yuffie, still clinging to him with her tiny hands gripping his fingers and her hair sticking up at crazy angles.

"The shadows? How far have they gotten?" he asked, his mind now steady and the desperate anger returning again.

An hour later the hilt – handle? - of his new weapon felt cumbersome in his hand: the shadows were still crawling over the castle-walls and they were getting further, faster, multiplying as they climbed on the thin-blue lines of the Lift Stop. They had taken another floor, had claimed even more of them, and he stood in the Entrance Hall now with the weight of the gunblade impossibly heavy in his hand. It was too late to defend the Lift Stop – the black mass had consumed it completely – and this hall and the Library was all they had left; if those two were lost they would be driven out of the castle and into the murky depths of the waterways.

A pair of yellow eyes blinked to un-life in the darkness and a shot rang out so quickly that he jumped before he realised that it was he who had pulled the trigger. The shadows – the accursed Heartless – halted but he could not tell if it was because they were confused at this new resistance or if it was because they were laughing at him. The respite lasted forever, an ever-lasting moment in which he could watch the huge shadow lumber towards him in that slow, lethal gait, and it ended so soon; before a heartbeat had gone by the claws came ripping out of the emptiness beyond the doorway and they cut into his flesh and drew blood.

White-hot pain lanced trough him as the crimson blood poured down his face and chest and his fingers convulsed around the hilt of his gunblade; in a last, spastic reflex he swung it forward and it hit the shadow without a sound, without any damage. Voices, a thousand voices called his name as he stared into the unfeeling, witch-light eyes of the Heartless monster and saw his bloodied face staring back at him.

The black rain fell on them as they retreated this last time, stumbling down the million stairs and the winding lifts and stops until the only steady ground they had left was the time-stopped waterways. Aerith's hands on his shoulders – so much stronger than they looked – and Yuffie's bony knees in his stomach like pikes and then the door shut behind him, enveloping them all in a darkness without eyes. Cid's voice somewhere far-off, talking about navigating with the stars and then he stopped listening, slumped against the wall like a throw-away puppet with Yuffie's limpet grip around his ribcage.

Somehow, through the confusion and the black rain and the pain, he had managed to hold onto the gunblade handed to him, and he stared at it now with the same deadened look in his eyes that he had seen in the witch-lights of the Heartless. The shadows had burned away the rust and the grime that had coated it and now it glinted a too cheerful silver in the darkness, clattering against the floor as the motor of whatever vehicle they were in hummed to life. Clean, simple lines, bullet and sword combined into one lethal whole, and yet it had been unable to even scratch the black shadows.

Cid, Aerith with her pink bow and pink dress, and the coltish, seven-year-old Yuffie were all that were left of his world, three beating hearts left out of a hundred. There should have been more, but his hands and his blade had been unable to protect him; he had been powerless against the overpowering darkness, helpless as the shadows devoured his home, his world, and now nothing would bring it back.

Squall Leonheart had failed. He had failed to protect his family, his world, himself. He had failed in every way possible, had been entrusted with the care of his world and had in those last moments thought only of saving himself.

Squall Leonheart did not deserve to live.

Squall Leonheart had died in the darkness devouring his existence, his reason for being.

Reborn out of darkness and blood came someone, something nameless, something stronger and more desperate, something that he would not allow to fail.

Through this rebirth he would avenge himself and his world, he would live this other life until Squall Leonheart was ready to be resurrected and brought back to the world, to the life he had not managed to save. Through this reborn life he would gain strength and he would fight like a lion for what was his....

...the lion.... Leon......

Yuffie stirred, clinging arms easing and letting him breathe, and her eyes were blue-grey exhaustion and sorrow as she awoke again. Squall Leonheart would not have let her cling; he would have dropped her and walked away, haughty and immature like the seventeen-year-old that he was. Leon felt as if he had aged a lifetime in a heartbeat, and he sat still and let her hold onto him even as his skin crawled. This was the start to his atonement.

"Squall...?" the child mumbled and he closed his eyes.

"Leon."