Mysteryguy12—thanks for the double review…you could review ten times and I'd still be squealing with delight! AWESOME fic from your end, too, and thanks again for the kind words!

xsaturnine: --prods back-- Yayness! I am assuming Mick can do magic, I just felt it would make sense. He used it in KHCoM, anyway. Thanks for reading…and here's a new chappie!

Platonic1—Yayness! Thanks for reviewing again, and for the love of the one-winged angel update! Your fic ROCKS!

Thanks to everyone who reads this, and please, as usual, R&R!

-K-

Chap 10

"What did you do?" she demanded. The mouse caught her tension and smiled tiredly at her, raising his hands in a submissive gesture.

"Calm down, I didn't hurt him. It was just Sleep, nothing more." He glanced at the once-again prone figure beside him. "It's not a common spell any more, but I'm glad I learned it. He had to be in terrible pain. I didn't want to leave him like that." That made perfect sense. Squall's bandaged chest rose and fell evenly, though the breaths he drew were slight and shallow. His skin, she recalled, had been hauntingly pale even before the spell. Aerith blushed.

"I'm sorry, I--"

"Nothing to forgive," the mouse dismissed, with another smile. "Had it been my friend I would've been suspicious too. No, I think he'll be okay, especially if he was tough enough to wake up that quickly."

"I thought that you did that with your Curaga."

"I did, somewhat, but I didn't give him near enough to bring him around. I was trying to close the wounds and stop the bleeding, but he must've seized some of the energy subconsciously and used it to wake himself up." He scratched a large, black ear. "I've never seen anything like it before." It was then that he noticed the unfinished bandaging job. Aerith caught his meaning and nodded, moving to finish her task, musing about her mangled thoughts.

Out of nowhere the odd pair in the Highwind had swept in to rescue them from a world where, presumably, no one else still existed. The mouse-man had helped swat off wyverns with stronger magic than any she'd ever seen and, subsequently, had pulled out a level of Cure beyond her and had saved Squall's life with it. None of it added up.

"I don't understand this: we've been wandering around fighting for months, looking for survivors or help and finding none. I had almost given up hope--" I'm still on that brink, a part of her knew "-but then you two showed up. How did you know how to find us? How did you even know we were alive?"

"Ask Mickey," Cid called back from the pilot's chair. "He's the one who guided me here. 'Said something about destiny, and he gave me some swanky bullshit about carriers of the Light."

"Fate whispers," the mouse said, a little cryptically. He ruined the effect by adding "With ears like mine, you can't help but overhear." Aerith was still puzzled--more so, in fact.

"That makes no sense."

"But it does," Mickey argued. "I have certain...connections to the Light, the only real weapon anyone can use to fight the Heartless: you know, those creatures that appeared on your planet. There's one specific person I'm looking for--the one the Light has chosen to destroy the Darkness--but there are others that have been marked by Fate to help turn the tides back against evil." He smiled at Aerith and, in a sweep of his short arms gestured to her, Yuffie and Squall. "Namely, you guys. You know it took the Heartless months to gain control here, right?" Aerith nodded; Yuffie groaned quietly, looking increasingly ill. "It doesn't usually take that long; hours, typically, perhaps a couple days or a week at most. Between the four of you, each from a different area, you held off the darkness's advances for far longer than it usually allows."

That didn't make sense, either. Aerith knew that she herself had managed very little against the Heartless when they'd invaded her village and knew Yuffie, the youngest among them, had been forced to turn tail and run from her home. Cloud and Squall were different stories...but that was beside the point. When the Heartless had come to her village that fateful day long before, she knew that she had not prevented any deaths.

And now, today, she'd failed again.

"I have never managed anything against those things...the Heartless," the girl whispered, head down. Her voice quivered not with sadness, but with long-suppressed rage. "Never have I done anything commendable against the creatures that attacked my home. For you to give me the credit for stalling them is just plain wrong. The ones that slowed them are incapacitated," she motioned curtly at Squall, "or...gone."

"For now," the mouse insisted again. He seemed unfazed by Aerith's uncharacteristic unstableness. "You will meet him again someday" there was no need to elaborate on who 'him' was "-in another world, perhaps. But you are wrong in calling yourself useless. You did more to help than you will ever realize. Speaking of," he looked at the thin talon cuts on each of the girl's biceps, the mark of one of the wyverns, "I should clean those out for you. It's hard telling where a Heartless's claws have been and you wouldn't want it getting infected." Aerith looked down and sighed, nodding after a moment's contemplation. As she sat down on the cool metal floor she heard Cid ask:

"So, what's the plan now, Mick?"

"As soon as I am sure this boy is stable enough, I have to go and continue searching for the key."

"Key?" Aerith questioned, hissing a moment later at the sting of the antiseptic in her cuts.

"I'll explain it to you a little later, once we've rested and are finished with patching you both up." He was deft at that action, Aerith noticed, as he was already wiping away the small runs of blood from her arms and was winding them with bandaging the same way she had done Squall's torso. His movements were more focused than hers had been, and twofold more precise. "I nearly forgot about his Blizzara injuries. I'd have looked just great to the Light if I'd let one of the Touched slip off because of a shoulder wound..." the mouse caught Aerith's look, a mixture of puzzlement, exhaustion and wariness. "The carriers I spoke of earlier are sometimes called the Touched by those who research the Light and the Darkness. I am one of those people, but" he raised a hand, silencing himself, "all of that can wait. It will wait." He tied the last knot on Aerith's left arm and stood, turning back to Squall. "I don't think I properly introduced myself. My name is Mickey."

"King Mickey," Cid corrected from the front. "Stop being so damn modest, Mick. This fella saved my ass about ten days back," the pilot explained to the girls, lighting up a cigarette. "I got overrun by some of those goddamned wizard Heartless and couldn't get off the ground. Tricky bastards, those wizards. Never did like magic users," he added, spitting the phrase 'magic users,' "Cheating bastards, the whole lot of 'em." Mickey chuckled. "Anyway, when I told him I was in his debt, he said that flying to the castle and rescuing you kids was all the repayment he needed. It was a damn good deal, so here I am."

"I still don't understand that," Aerith mumbled. Mickey's Curaga had healed up the minor cuts Squall had all over him and he was working diligently on the youth's shoulder, the only mildly serious wound he had left to be tended. He was nearly out of wraps.

"You don't need to right now. Besides," he tacked on, nodding at his patient, "how upset do think he'll be if he wakes up clueless and you completely understand what's going on? Meaning no disrespect, but I don't really want him turning that sword of his on me."

"I get the picture: you don't want to tell me anything right now. Fine." Aerith was tired of fighting, thinking, feeling...she just wanted to rest. A strong, sudden desire to sleep nearly drove her into a faint. Once again, Mickey surprised her by catching on.

"There--finished. Cid, will you come back and put him on a bunk so that he can rest? I think Aerith could use one as well." How does he do that? the girl wondered.

- - - - - - -- - - - -- - - - --

Well, there we go. One step closer to the end of "Escape!" cries I do love this fic…and I've just begun the first of the two prequels. I also wrote a FFVII Advent Children one-shot. Anyone interested?

-K-