Simba the lion cub had been introduced to violence at an age when even a lion cub should be innocent. He had watched in mute horror as a beast made of a thousand smaller beasts swallowed his father up and shredded Simba's future with dull horn hooves. He had curled up against the mangled body of the most important thing in his entire world, and he had begged it not to be dead. But it was.

And he might as well have been, too.

Since then he had lived as a kind of shadow. A caricature of what he could have been; a small strip of the promised swath of regal nobility that was his birthright. He loved his surrogate family with a passion he had only ever shown his real family, odd and obscene as it may have seemed. After all, a lion curling up with a boar? But he had, at night, when the nightmares became too real and the cold that should have been nipped away by his mother's soft fur became too oppressive. He had defied nature, and nurture, and the unbreakable laws of the Serengeti itself; and he had submitted to being comforted by his lowly but loving brothers as evening's shadows grew long and thin.

But after the dusk, when the sun turned his face away and the clouds shuddered beneath the weight of the darkness, his mind had always wandered back to the past. To the 'I could have's and the 'Why didn't I's, and the 'Why has this happened to me?'s. When he dreamed, he dreamed of his father's face, and his mother's voice, and the feel of a stranger's hands as he cried 'Behold, here, the one that shall rule you all!'

He dreamt of all the things he could have had but didn't, because of one evil...

blackened...

heart.

"You stole them from me!" Simba roared. The words splattered upon the ground like drops of blood, stuck there between him and his enemy; a wound too grave to heal.

When he had left, he was barely a paw wide and fragile around the ribcage; weak as only a kitten can be.

Now he stood head and shoulders above Scar, magnificent, the grandest achievement of a king who would never know it. He was an adult, and he was wronged, and all he wanted was Scar's neck between his teeth. Never before had he felt such a raging violence, such desire to spill life's blood. But retribution had to found, and so help him, he would find it. "When I look at you," Simba grated, ripping the words from his heart and forcing them past his throat, "I see you as you looked the day you killed my father.

"When I hear your voice, I hear the earth trembling beneath the wildebeest's feet." His muscles rippled like watered silk beneath his fur. His shoulder blades jutted from his back as he circled his rival, becoming more and more pronounced as he lowered his body to the ground. The lionesses were behind him somewhere, antagonizing the jackals' insane cracking laughter.

"But when I open your hide, when I taste your blood on my teeth and my claws, and shake it out of my eyes, it will not be for my FATHER. After I crush your spine between my jaws and leave your body to rot in the elephant's graveyard, I will cry, 'This is for me...for the man I could have been. The man I could have been, and won't be.'" It was becoming more and more difficult to speak as his lips receded off teeth unworn by anything but insects. Another humiliation he could add to Scar's tally.

Scar was still. He watched the Lion Prince circle him with one ever-roving eye, muscles strung tight and ears against his skull. He was not what he had been, in the prime of his life. He didn't know if he still had what it took to put this pup down again, and the thought of losing the power he had committed so much evil for made his ruddy fur darken with sweat. The jackals would help him, but the jackals weren't here.

"What are you waiting for?" Simba echoed, slurred through his fangs. "Fight me!"

He feinted in, gouging inches of dirt from the ground to Scar's left. Scar remained unmoving. If he could get a clear shot, he'd go for an eye or an unprotected back. Above them, the sky rumbled throaty disdain.

"FIGHT ME!" Simba raged, swiping distended claws at Scar's remaining eye. He was fast.

"Simba!" Nala cried behind them, but her voice was lost below thunder.

"FIGHT ME!" he roared, and this time, he lunged for a kill.

Scar attacked.