Disclaimer: Final Fantasy VIII, Dissidia: Final Fantasy, associated characters and their games of origin are the intellectual property of Squaresoft/Square Enix. Which is not me. If deed-poll could change this, I'm sure we'd all have heard of it by now…dammit.

Rating: T

Category: Crossover – FFVIII/FF-game to be announced/Dissidia (at beginning only); (Self-)Challenge – to be announced

Summary: Squall returns from Cosmos' realm a changed man – grown, matured, wiser. Which should have been a good thing, if not for the fact that the Squall-shaped hole in his world's future has suddenly grown too small for this new Squall…

A/N: Dissidia is included only as the starting point for this fic; as such, familiarity with the game is not required beyond the bare top-of-the-head basics. The actual crossover will become apparent in Chap-2, and be outright stated as Chaps-3/4 are posted. In the meantime, enjoy!
P.S.: The initial italics are deliberate.

The Vitruvian Paradox

Chapter One: Juxtaposition

—ox-oxo-xo—

'Rinoa…' That was her name. And…this, Squall Leonhart realised as he stared down at the innocuous object that had just floated down to him in the wake of Zidane's departure, was her feather. To Rinoa was the promise he'd spoken of to the Onion Knight a deceptively brief time ago, the promise he needed to fulfil now, at the end of their long war.

He could feel a great, complex morass of memories, uncoiling within his brain like a waking serpent… or a…G.F.? Yeah, like a Guardian Force marking out its subliminal boundaries in his mind. Long-partitioned connections began to slip into place as the crucial component was restored – not instantly, for they had been sundered long ago and parts over-written uncountable times, but it wouldn't be long before his memory was as complete as it had ever been. Which…as it turned out, had never been that great to start with. But it was what he had to work with. It would do.

It was a matter of minutes until full restoration was achieved, if he had to guess.

A small corner of his mind noted the apparent solution to a minor mystery from earlier. Bartz's good luck charm had been finely (if accidentally) tuned to niggle at him with the unwanted sense of something precious that was missing to him. A chocobo feather was a poor substitute to the one now nestled in his hand as far as he was concerned, but to each their own…

In the meantime, the world had slid into shades of scintillating blue, and he could smell flowers. Given that Tidus and Zidane had just experienced the same thing, Squall could only assume that his ticket home had just been punched.

He regarded his compatriots, or at least those who hadn't left already, searching for some words of farewell… ideally, words which did not include 'whatever' or their equivalent among them. Apart from them in body he might have been for much of their latest journey, but not in spirit. For all their mistakes (not that he was innocent on that score), they had each held their own – and prevailed. They were worth knowing, worth remembering, even if most of them weren't people he would have just hung out with for kicks given the choice. It had been an honour to complete this mission alongside them.

"Perhaps we can go on a mission together again."

Yeah, that would work. Not as pithy as Tidus' or Zidane's farewells, but it had the advantage of being true to his sentiments, the lessons he had learned here.

As the world faded away, the last thing that he saw was Cloud Strife walking past him. And the last thing he heard as the vortex swallowed him was Cloud's reply.

"Hmph… Not interested."

Squall's dry snort of exasperated amusement was lost to the others as he vanished…

—ox-oxo-xo—

…It wasn't as if he couldn't see Cloud's point. No doubt each of them had their own friends, back in the worlds they were returning to. To each their own, after all – and each home called them all.

Or maybe Cloud Strife was just an antisocial jerk. Whatever.

Meanwhile, his apparent surroundings had plunged into a stygian depth so potent that it seemed almost solid. If not for the way that those bands of particularly thick darkness pulsed, rushing past over and under and to his sides as they shot away into the distance as if he were falling face-up down an endless tunnel – and if not for the way that he still appeared to be glowing bright blue and easily visible, thus able to pick up the differing tones in the rings of black – he might have been justifiably alarmed.

That given, it would likely be a good idea to see what exactly he was hurtling towards.

Turning turned out to be tricky, but focusing on that lingering scent of flowers seemed to help for some reason. Probably helped with his sense of direction…or something.

Irrelevant seconds ticked into meaningless minutes as Squall continued to fall, the rusty links of his original memories drifting into place in fits and clumps as his personal shard of Cosmos began to dissipate in lockstep. He let the integration happen at its own pace, watching instead with detached interest as his gunblade abruptly morphed into the familiar adamantine dimensions of Lionheart. His clothing shifted slightly, scraping against his skin as it followed suit; the eldritch tingling of his pockets did not go unnoticed either, his pocket dimension's controls presumably resetting to their native configuration.

Squall couldn't help but twitch as three distinct aggregates of consciousness tumbled out of the disordered coils of his memory-bundle and looked around in confusion. The trio of newly released G.F.s quickly communed with each other and with his inner databank of events, and understanding dawned – the last they'd known, they had been in the middle of—

In the middle of…

Something. Something terrible, and terribly important. Something that had his G.F.s suddenly thrashing about in alarm, as a light began to wink at the end of the tunnel.

And as that terrible understanding dawned on Squall in turn, that light snapped into focus—

The time warp.

The barren, shrinking island trap at Time's end.

The lost sorceress, floating dead in a space made purely of imagined fear impregnated with projected malice.

The lost warrior, scrabbling at his face, in the depths of outwardly inflicted madness… at the incorporeal, inexorable hands of the Entity, scrabbling to grasp something far more dangerous than the youth's physical form, lashing out at its destined destroyer in its last, desperate attempt to save itself – by stripping the stranded man of his own self.

There was a Moment, one single Moment, in which the returning Squall gazed from within the vortex, from without his body, at the face of his imminent demise, falling helplessly towards himself like a lamb to the slaughter—

It would take years to even begin to unravel what happened in that Moment, and in the pivotal Moment which followed on its dying breath. That forensic investigation was conducted by others, more scientifically minded than one Squall Leonhart; even so, it would take decades for those inquiring minds, minds like Ellone Loire and Quistis Trepe (though categorically not Doctor Odine, which admittedly might have added to the delay) and other minds never known to the Orphanage Gang, to decode the specifics, the many forces at play in that catalytic twist of the fates.

A name, based on the drawings of a long-dead philosopher of another world, was nonetheless eventually assigned to the unique phenomenon: the Vitruvian Paradox…