The boy absolutely refuses to drop this magic business. He gets more and more frustrated with each denied request but soldiers on, bringing it up in company so the mage has to make excuses not only to the boy but to the knight and the gang at Traverse Town. The mage has also caught the boy watching him from under lowered lashes more than a few times, mimicking the mage's actions during spellcasting as if declaring that, fine, he doesn't need a teacher, he'll just get the hang of it on his own, he's the Keyblade Master and he can do anything and everything all by himself. He doesn't need instruction. He doesn't need help.

What's worse is that he imagines it to be a secret, those few spells he's finally managed to activate. He's oh so very careful to hide his practice trials, so cautious about not using magic in front of his companions, no doubt planning to impress them both one day with some kind of convenient and showy exhibition that the boy will just casually dismiss as 'a few things he'd picked up here and there.' Eager to impress, like any child.

The mage doesn't have to see anything to know what's going on. He can smell the disturbed energy in the air like ozone. He can feel the roiling currents left in the wake of the boy's clumsy handling, like the bubbles and churning water left behind by a boat propeller in the ocean. Sometimes he'll even notice it in the confined air of the gummi ship, which never fails to trip all his internal alarms. All it takes is one fire spell to eat up all their oxygen or blow out the side of the ship and the boy is all too capable of triggering just such a result accidentally. The Keyblade has to be acting as an enhancer for the boy's meager natural talents; no untrained amateur should be able to 'copy' spells just by seeing them performed a few times and then mimicking the caster's actions.

The mage thinks, and not for the first time, that the Keyblade is a truly powerful tool, or it would be if it weren't in the hands of an idiot.

The boy melts a hole in the ship's hull perhaps a week later, trying out a light spell that he'd either copied or wheedled out of someone, the mage never finds out which. Fortunately, they're not in space at the time. The mage screams himself hoarse, cursing the boy for doing it, the whoeveritwas that might have taught him the spell, the Knight for not stopping it, the King for being the cause of everything in the first place, and himself for being too good to stoop to infanticide.

Cid is roaring and chomping at them even before they limp into port, a near seamless blend between the rant on the viewscreen and them opening the hatch to hear it live. Weeks, he growls, chewing furiously on his cigar. Weeks it'll take to fix this, what the hell were you doing with it, goddamn civilians trying to handle delicate equipment they'd no training with, letting kids mess with it.

"They don't let me pilot," the boy grumbles, entirely missing the point.

The mage pointedly doesn't say anything about asteroids, even at the risk of privately agreeing with Cid which was only slightly worse than publicly agreeing with Cid. Mages and engineers don't get along on principle.

So they're stuck in Traverse Town yet again (which has never seemed smaller), stuck with Traverse Town's Heartless denizens barely putting a dent in the boy's overabundant energy stockpiles and stuck with Traverse Town's human denizens getting more and more politely desperate. The boy has a thing for rooftops and amazingly inconvenient unlocked doors. He and Yuffie are unholy terrors and no one believes for a moment that teaching the boy 'how to ninja' has anything to do with training to fight the Heartless.

It takes only a short while for the delay to chafe both guests and hosts; Cid forced to resort to chasing the boy out of his shop with the business end of a very wicked looking spear and Leon taking to disappearing for entire days so the boy can't pester him for matches. Suddenly all the townspeople have Looks and Cid has Looks and Leon has Looks and even patient and saintly Aerith has Looks, and the mage wants to know who put the sign on his back that says Responsible For Stupid.

"This is supposed to be our savior?" Leon demands out of the boy's hearing, stormy gray-blue gaze cold on the teenager's poorly restrained exuberance as he chases Yuffie around. The boy is nursing a few strained tendons, results of his own enthusiastic idiocy during yet another ill-fated sparring match. Leon hadn't even need to knock him down this time. "I thought you two were supposed to be teaching him how to fight. We need him to fight."

"He can fight just fine," the mage snaps back, sick of this conversation and the fact that the boy is not doing anything to inspire anyone's confidence. "The Keyblade takes care of itself."

"He's going to get killed if you let this continue." Leon isn't taking the boy's injury well, as if it were some kind of personal insult to himself.

"Who said I'm in charge of him?"

"He's only fourteen," comes the reply after a second's pause, and the mage resists the urge to roll his eyes. Of course. Iceheart's only weakness, his oh so tragic past. A few too many hits across the boy's thick skull and Leon is starting to see defeat in him, great destiny be damned, the same helpless defeat that a younger Leon had suffered at the claws of the Heartless when Radiant Garden fell. Suffered and never recovered from.

Which still isn't the mage's problem. He whips out his wand and zaps a shadow Heartless that had appeared across the square. "So train him why don't you, if you're so worried."

"What?"

"He whacks things with a blunt object. You whack things with a pointy object. He'll do anything you ask if you throw the word 'rematch' in there ….or actually, he'd do anything you ask anyway."

Leon's scowl is almost worth the irritation of this conversation, and the mage smiles unkindly. "Anyway, I'm sure you can teach him much more about how to stay alive than I can, seeing as you're so good at it."

The scowl disappears as Leon's face shuts down. He's never forgiven himself for surviving where others from his world did not, and everyone knows it, and the mage almost, almost feels bad for using it as a weapon, except that Leon is supposed to be the leader of the Traverse Town faction which is allied with the King, and so far all he's done by way of 'help' for the King's men is shove the boy at the them and then bitch about their lack of progress.

The mage tells himself he is a very unscrupulous duck, and that he will feel very bad about this later, and pushes the dagger in deeper. "It's probably best that we came in when we did, anyway. We met up with some nasty creatures on that last world and he rushed in, of course, before we could catch up, and by the time we got there— "

Leon cuts him off far too quickly to even pretend that his frigid disinterest is still genuine. "You said he could handle himself."

"I am not a blademaster, and neither is my partner," the mage bluntly informs the scarred man. "You are. If you're not going to train him, don't whine at me when he gets hurt because he's untrained."

"If he got hurt, it would be because you allowed it." Leon had never been a gracious loser.

The mage shrugs as he saunters off, triumphant. "Pain is the best teacher."

When the boy comes running up to him later, all but bursting at the seams with excitement because omigosh omigosh Leon was going to teach him Leon was actually going to spend time with him and train him omigosh, the mage can't resist tossing a wink at the knight's mildly incredulous expression.

"And here I thought you didn't like him," the knight remarks once the boy is gone, cautiously pleased on the boy's behalf but unsure of what could have possibly prompted the mage to do something for their third.

"Are you kidding?" The mage cackles. "Leon will pound him into the concrete and he'll just ask for more. He'll be so busy collecting bruises from his idol he'll finally leave me alone about teaching him magic. I should have done this weeks ago."

The knight just sighs his patient sigh. So much for altruism.

Handing the boy off to Leon proves to be an excellent move anyway. The boy's idol worship complex is rocked a bit by the shock of reality, that Leon wasn't going to pull any punches during this training and wasn't going put up with anything less than the boy's most sincere, concentrated efforts. Leon proves in some way the mage had never been able to impress on the boy that this isn't a game, and slowly, ever so slowly, the seriousness of the scarred man's attitude towards fighting the Heartless leeches into the boy's own. There are even fewer complaints in the field, less of 'why me' and more of 'for the sake of those that can't defend themselves.'

"Don't strain anything patting yourself on the back," Cid comments sourly, annoyed by the mage's vindictive glee. "He may be learning how to swing around that stick of his, but Iceheart'll fuck him up just by association. He won't learn cooperation in battle. Leon's never heard of it."

Leon had, actually, he just preferred to fight without the company of crotchety pilots and klepto ninjas and occasionally overbearing flower girls who had never learned to take his orders as a commander and never would. And, personal lone wolf preferences or not, Leon had been a dedicated soldier on his homeworld, and like any soldier he'd been trained in melee combat, how to work around and with other troops. By virtue of iron will and patience and the unforgiving flat of his gunblade (and just to spite Cid), he inexorably drills the importance of teamwork into the boy's spiky head. It's worth enduring the boy's complaints about sadistic leather wearing crazies just to see his amazingly rapid progress with the Keyblade.

"Guard high!" Leon barks sharply, while the boy grits his teeth and whips around barely in time to block an attack by a soldier type Heartless springing on him from the roof above. The knight looks briefly worried but the mage has to resist the urge to cackle evilly. Leon believed in practical exercises, which meant live enemies, and the mage has nothing but approval for it. Leon also believed that certain comments to Yuffie about 'defeating Heartless with one hand tied behind my back' were a personal affront to whatever warrior code that the scarred man (and the boy, by default as a student) followed, and the boy now found himself facing off against a field of Heartless with one arm, indeed, strapped behind his back with two of Leon's belts.

The mage heartily approves of this as well.

"Atta boy!" he calls, as the kid is knocked off his feet by a Heartless he hadn't even seen coming and swarmed under by shadows. Leon is eventually obliged to stride over and fish the boy out by his collar.

"Is this really training?" Aerith asks waspishly. She doesn't often come to watch, and this is exactly why, with the mage's all too obvious delight over the boy getting a beatdown.

The mage looks innocent. "What else would it be?"

"Flirting," Yuffie yawns from her rooftop perch, absently twirling Conformer as she watches the boy and Leon fight back to back, the swordsman covering his student's deficiencies until the boy learned how to stop favoring his unhindered side. "Flirt flirt flirt."

"Jealous?" the mage needles, in far too good a mood to let Aerith's disapproval ruin it.

The ninja girl flips nimbly off the roof and lands as gracefully as any dancer, grinning her most untrustworthy grin. "I saw him first. You should have sent him to me for training."

"Light forbid," Cid mutters, shouldering past them with a crate of parts. "One of you's bad enough."

Yuffie's magnificent comeback is interrupted by a shadow crawling up from the cobblestones between them, a straggler from the designated arena, so she settles for sticking her tongue out at Cid and swatting the Heartless in his direction before dashing over to run damage control on the other crawlies that were straying out of the combat zone to hone in on hearts more vulnerable than Leon's and the boy's. Cid loses his cigar screeching obscenities after her, dancing around trying to avoid the shadow while keeping his hold on the full crate.

Later, with all Heartless cleared and lesson learned, the boy drops down to one knee, hanging off the Keyblade, exhausted and out of breath and something close to hard won contentment on his face when Leon offers him a gloved hand and a rare, quiet word of approval. It matches the distant satisfaction that is Leon's expression, and for a moment elder and younger look exactly the same.

The last one left watching from the top of the stairs, the mage idly decides he doesn't exactly disapprove of this. For the moment.