Disclaimer: Irrevocably not mine.

A/N: This is the sequel to The Most Dangerous Game, a prequel fic that dealt with the fall of Radiant Garden and the strange mentor/pupil relationship between Leon and Xigbar when they were still Squall and Braig. This fic was requested by Thien as the prize for winning the Scrib!Fic Fanart Contest 2009. Sorry it took so long, but I hope you enjoy it anyway.

Triptych

© Scribbler, August 2009.

1. The Ghost and the Failure

Could you become a ghost without actually dying?

Hardly the best question to ask when running at breakneck speed along a cliff path – emphasis on breakneck. One wrong step here could lead to a long drop with a short stop on the jagged rocks below. There was a reason it was called Devil's Peak. In actual fact, it was a really bad question to be asking, because not only was this the steepest cliff outside Traverse Town, it was also twilight and raining, which made the journey extra dangerous.

Scree kept coming loose whenever Leon's feet hit the ground. More than once he had to throw out a hand to grab at the wall beside him as he pounded towards the summit. Yet Leon, usually so cautious, barely registered the danger. He was too busy debating two great riddles of his life: was it possible for a person to die soul-first, and would he make it in time?

He couldn't shake the misgiving he was already too late. He couldn't blame Aerith for keeping him – neither of them could have known they'd come back to an empty house – but there was always the compunction to blame himself. Once just a vague impulse that came with being a teenager, now it was second nature for his mind to seek out the ways that he personally could have prevented bad things from happening. It was disturbing how many times he succeeded in convincing himself he was a screw-up.

He breathed a sigh of relief when he crested the rise and saw a figure highlighted against the skyline. The last streaks of sunset sliced the sky, just visible through the rain. The figure turned at Leon's approach, but there was no clue whether he'd been waiting specifically, or just happened to still be here.

There was a time Leon would have known. There was a time he wouldn't have had to doubt himself. They used to be friends – best friends, even if he'd been skipped ahead in training, moved to the social circles of the older class at a time when that sort of thing still mattered.

Except had it? Had it ever really been an issue? Not between them. Maybe not in any way. Leon remembered being hazed by the older boys, who were jealous of his talents and his age. Just two years between them, but it had made such a difference at the time. It was embarrassing to be beaten by a pipsqueak. It was humiliating to know you'd never beat the child prodigy. It was suicide to fraternise with it.

He had never fitted in. It sounded lame now, when he was nearly twenty and had coped with far worse than bullying, but for a long time that fact had defined him. He was the perfect cadet, but he was antisocial and found it difficult to interact with others outside training exercises. Teachers called him a machine. Students called him a freak. He recalled long evenings alone, reading up on combat theory in the library, or putting in enough extra hours at the shooting range that even the dumbest canon-fodder recruit realised he was chalking up three times anybody else's quota – and making them all look bad in comparison. He was the keen freak – teacher's pet, although that title had taken on a whole new meaning when Radiant Garden fell, and Leon realised the unpleasant truths of the adults running his life.

Cloud had never cared. Not in the way the others did. He was the first to treat Leon like a regular kid – the first in his whole life. Even his father had never done that. Captain Leonheart had wanted his son to succeed, and Leon had wanted to make his father proud. They had each genuinely thought that would make the other happy, but in the end all the pushing and striving to be the best had done was to orchestrate a situation where one died and the other was consigned to a slow death by a thousand paper-cut regrets.

Standing on the cliff now, Leon was transported back to the day her first met Cloud Strife. Not the most auspicious of beginnings: he had been trussed up and left to free himself in a pile of dung behind the stables at the time. He recalled how he had just about got one hand free when someone leaned over him and didn't try to retie it.

"Are you okay?"

"You're not seriously asking me that, are you?"

The boy had flushed, and then wordlessly tried to untie the knots Leon's struggles had pulled tight.

"There's a knife," Leon had said eventually, tired and sick of the stink. Maybe it was the fumes making him careless. There was no other way he would've revealed the weapon while he was in such a precarious position, especially to a stranger. The boys who had left him there had done worse before, and there was always the chance they could have recruited this unassuming-looking boy to take the rap in exchange for leaving him alone. "In my boot."

"Cadets aren't allowed to carry weapons outside class."

"I know. Use it to cut me free."

The boy had paused, and then tentatively removed the switchblade. It was decorated with Griever, the lion-head emblem of the Leonheart family crest. After cutting through the restraints he had stared at it, resting in his open palm. Leon could easily have snatched it away, but apparently he either didn't realise or didn't care.

"You're Squall Leonheart."

"Yeah. So?"

"People talk about you a lot."

"So?" A serrated edge of defiance had crept into Leon's voice. If this kid wanted to make something of it, then let him try.

The boy had squinted at him. "They never said you liked chocobos so much."

The raucous squawk of the giant riding birds echoed around them from their stalls. Leon had just stared at the boy, trying to read the slur he was no doubt giving. Yet the clear blue eyes staring back at him had been so painfully sincere and honest it was impossible to think they could be anything less.

"I don't."

"Shame. They're faster than horses and way more intelligent. You should try riding one sometime."

And that had been it: their friendship, begun amidst the shit and squawking of enormous glorified chickens.

And Leon had never been more grateful for anything in his life.

Cloud, unlike most boys in the Royal Guard Training Programme, wasn't originally from Radiant Garden. His home was a tiny mountain village in the North where snow was the norm and people prayed for the thaw so they could get out of their front doors instead of climbing through windows onto the top of the latest drift.

"I was amazed when I arrived in the Autumn semester to tryout for the programme," he said once. "Lowland winters are so mild."

Leon, who had felt like his fingers and toes were in danger of dropping off from September to March, just grunted.

Cloud had come down from his village with another girl, and through her Leon learned the reality behind his misconception that women were weaker than men and needed protecting. Tifa was to the term 'helpless maiden' what 'a bit warm' was to volcanoes, and 'slightly grouchy' when used as a description of Captain Cid Highwind.

"And don't you forget it!" she'd snapped after knocking him on his ass for the third time in hand-to-hand combat.

Tifa was two years behind him, in the female counterpart of Cloud's class, but the first time she challenged Leon to a fight she wiped the floor with him. It had felt … kind of good, actually; like someone had given him permission not to be perfect all of a sudden. He had never told Commander Braig about it. Instinct had informed him that his mentor would have been displeased to hear his student was not only accepting challenges from lower-classmen, but getting whooped by them despite his status as a prodigy. Leon didn't really get to know Tifa properly until Cloud was compulsorily 'recruited' by Commander Dilan as a law enforcement cadet.

The thought made Leon gag now. Recruitment? No. That was the code used to cover up all those who went missing. How could he have been so blind? How could he have not realised Cloud hadn't just found better friends in his new training programme?He has disappeared because Leon was close to him. If he hadn't befriended Leon, Cloud would have been okay. Maybe. Better than now, at least. Even dying in that final battle would've been better than now.

Their friendship had been what got Leon through as a teen. Cloud made him feel like he wasn't a freak. At first, he had seemed in awe of Leon's talents. Then he was just impressed. Eventually he took them for granted, which made Leon feel better than any amount of praise. Cloud treated him like any normal kid, and if he hid behind Leon slightly when bullies were around, Leon could handle that. It was a small price to pay for his first true friend, which was why it had stung so much when Cloud moved dorms and seemed to sever all contact with his old friends.

Were they still friends now? Leon studied the hard line of Cloud's jaw and the even harder blue of his eyes. He barely recognised the boy who had laughed when he tried to give mountain-style chocobo-riding lessons and Leon kept falling off.

It had been years, yes, but the features were still the same. Cloud's face was still recognisable, and he still had that stupid hair like the back end of an electrocuted chocobo, but he was different underneath now. He had grown up … wrong. There was no other way to put it. It oozed off him like slime, the impression that somewhere along the way something had gotten into the mix that made up Cloud Strife and made him change in ways he wasn't supposed to.

Leon gritted his teeth.

"You followed me?" Cloud didn't sound surprised. He didn't sound interested at all. Again, so very wrong for him. He had always been the inquisitive but shy one, while Leon was the stoic tactician who stood back and assessed every situation for hazards before saying a word.

Since the moment Cloud turned up out of the blue, startling everyone with his sudden and unexpected return from the dead, he had said everything in the same flat monotone that made it impossible to tell whether he was happy, sad, frustrated, or something else entirely. Gone was the positive, oh-so-earnest boy Leon had known. What was left was a Changeling, who looked at his friends like they were the strangers. A giant signpost in Cloud's head couldn't have pointed it out any clearer: something went wrong here, and is still going wrong now, right this second, before your very eyes, and you can't do anything to stop it.

"You're not leaving," Leon said tightly.

"You can't stop me," Cloud replied, not with defiance, but quiet certainty that even if he tried, Leon wouldn't be able to do a damn thing. The balance of power between them had shifted from when they were cadets. Even more disturbing, though, was the look in his eyes – despair and anger and determination so strong it made Leon's teeth hurt, all overlaid with the kind of deadness you'd expect to find in catatonia victims.

Disturbing, yes, but not quite as disturbing as all the things Cloud hadn't told him: like where he'd been in the years since Radiant Garden was razed, where his wing and claw had come from, how he had come to possess a giant sword wrapped in used bandages, or whose blood had been on them before this damnable rain washed it off.

Or why he was chasing General Sephiroth.

Leon's mind snagged as if on a rusty nail. The last time he'd seen Cloud was when both he and Sephiroth were being absorbed by magic made from pure darkness. It had seemed to eat them alive, along with innumerable actual dead bodies. Sephiroth had screamed like a soul in torment as those bodies seemed to be absorbed right into him. If it had been awful for even a war-hardened general like him, what had it done to an inexperienced boy like Cloud?

Killed him, Leon had thought until now.

For a long time he had been forced to accept that his friend and Resplendia's foremost warrior were dead. It wasn't true, he knew now, but perhaps reality was worse. Something had happened to Cloud that day, and also in the time before that, when he was missing but his friends hadn't realised. He had been tortured, that much was clear, and left for dead in a cell beneath the castle, before being accidentally caught up in the battle to kill Sephiroth.

Could you die in your mind and heart but still keep going in your body? If it was possible, Cloud was the proof. Against expectation, he lived for nothing but finding and defeating Sephiroth now. He wouldn't explain why he thought of the man as an enemy when they'd both been through an experience that should have given them common ground to be allies. Leon suspected it was to do with the years that had elapsed since the end of Radiant Garden – the time that earned a blank stare from Cloud whenever anyone asked about them. Not even Tifa had been able to turn him back from this fixated stranger he'd become, and she'd known Cloud since they were practically still in diapers.

You can't stop me.

"I can try," Leon said, setting his feet and bringing Lionheart to bear.

Cloud stared at the gunblade. Nothing new entered his eyes, but he said softly, "You still use that?"

"You're not leaving," Leon said again. "I won't let you."

"I don't need your permission to do anything anymore, Squall."

He flinched. "I told you before, it's -"

"Leon now. I know. But you're still using that gunblade, so maybe it's not."

"Shut up." Leon's words were frosty. No, he told himself, don't be aggressive. You'll just drive him away faster. Make him realise he has to stay.

"You repainted it," Cloud went on, unperturbed. "You renamed it. You put it in a new town and added your family crest, but it's still the same underneath." Cloud looked him straight in the eye. "Squall."

Leon swore he heard one of his own molars crack. "Where have you been, Cloud?" he asked for the hundredth time.

"Looking for the one who reflects all the darkness in me."

"That doesn't even make any sense!"

"And changing your name because you feel ashamed does?"

"More than dropping back into our lives only to leave again five minutes later."

"I've been here three days."

"Because when you landed you were beat up so bad it took Aerith days to fix you. She said you have a complex physiognomy now, more than an average human body."

Cloud blinked. "And the bat wing wasn't your first clue?"

For a second Leon dared to hope this was a hint of the old Cloud shining through. The old Cloud wasn't above making jokes or sarcasm. The old Cloud would have stayed longer. The old Cloud wouldn't have …

Wouldn't have been in that dungeon, cast aside like all the other bodies, if he hadn't been so closely connected to Leon. That really was why Cloud was the way he was now – because he had been Leon's friend, and the unknown forces at work in the background of Leon's life couldn't allow him to have such a close connection, so it had been ripped away, with Cloud's humanity along for the ride. Cloud was collateral damage, and that fact was bitterest of all.

This is my fault, Leon had thought countless times over the past three days, as he used to when he thought Cloud's death could be laid at his feet. He shouldn't have even been there. He shouldn't have …

Cloud turned away.

"What part of 'you're not leaving' don't you understand? You're not leaving us again, Cloud. We finally got you back. No way in hell we're letting you go again so soon."

"You don't get a choice in the matter," Cloud replied without looking around. "This isn't your quest. It's mine."

"Quest? Quest?" Leon took a step forward. "This isn't a game, Cloud! We thought you were dead. We grieved you. You can't expect us to go through that again. It's not fair. It's not fair, and it's not right. Are you really going to do that to Tifa?"

"Tifa?" Cloud sounded untroubled, as if it really hadn't occurred to him that she might want him to stay.

"The girl you grew up with! The girl you used to have a crush on when we were cadets! Don't you remember? She mourned you, Cloud, and she blamed herself for not realising you needed us when Dilan took you away. She spent all this time thinking your death was her fault, and it cut pieces out of her every time. You didn't see it. You weren't here. She's spent all this time getting back on her feet after the stuff she saw that day. Don't put her back there. Don't make her mourn you again. You can't be that vindictive." Leon blinked, not sure if he was really talking about Tifa anymore.

"Can't I?" Cloud actually chuckled. It was so unexpected it sent a chill down Leon's spine that had nothing to do with being soaked to his skin. "And you?"

Those thoughts couldn't be allowed to blur his resolve now. Leon tightened his grip. "I'm going to shoot you if you try to leave."

"You won't."

"How do you know? You've already pointed out we're different than we used to be."

"Not you. Not that way. You won't hurt me. You can't."

"What makes you so sure? Desperate men do desperate things, Cloud."

"You're not that desperate."

"I lost everything!" It came out a shout that was almost a scream, which gurgled away to a dull growl in his throat and chest, nestled against his heart. "And I couldn't save any of it, so don't you dare tell me I'm not fucking desperate. My father died. Was murdered. People I thought I could trust … they killed him. And you. I thought you had died at their hands too. I spent all this time hating them for that, when you were alive somewhere playing catch-me-if-you-can with General Sephiroth."

Cloud's mouth became a thin line.

Damn it. Yeah, bring that up and fling it at him. Smart move, Leon. "I'm not letting you walk out of my life this time, Cloud. Not without a fight. You're my friend. Or at least," he said bitterly, "you used to be."

It was an invitation for Cloud to say they still were. Leon waited with a strange thickness in his throat. The tension sat heavy in his stomach, making him feel sick. So much of his life had gone wrong. The level of loss he'd undergone would have destroyed a lesser personality. This final fragment might still do it. to have something taken away is actually far easier than to have it returned, see it's broken, and then lose it again before you can fix it.

Cloud looked over his shoulder. "You'll let me go."

"No, I -"

"Because if it was Commander Braig, you'd go in a heartbeat. You wouldn't even think about it. And I'd let you go." He narrowed his eyes. "Deny it. Deny that you'd follow if you were in my position and Braig was in Sephiroth's."

Leon opened his mouth, but no words came out. Just hearing that name was enough to seize up his throat with fury, grief and a million of the other emotions that had inundated him since his mentor helped unleash the Heartless on a castle full of innocents, betrayed them all, and proved himself a pitiless murderer of his own people before Leon's eyes. Commander Braig was in a huge proportion of Leon's memories as a cadet, but he was in a larger proportion of his nightmares.

Cloud gave a single curt nod. "I thought so." He took a run at the cliff edge and threw himself into empty space.

Leon started forward, but heard the rubbery thwack of that unnatural wing extending. Cloud banked upwards, coming up diagonal to compensate for the weight of his sword, facing away from the cliff. It was impossible to fly on only one wing. It was impossible to carry a sword that big. It was impossible to return from the dead, or survive even a fragment of what Cloud had survived with your sanity still intact.

He didn't look back.

Leon rushed to the edge, heedless of the danger, and shouted, "You have to come back! You don't get to just fuck off like this, Cloud! You have to come back, whether or not you find Sephiroth, or else I'll find you and drag you back by your hair. You can't just expect us to forget you're alive now that we know. You're not leaving us forever, you hear me? Cloud! Cloud!"

But Cloud was too far away to hear him over the rain. If, indeed, he had been listening at all. His new laser-like intensity was focussed exclusively on Sephiroth and whatever unspoken reasons he had for finding him.

Leon realised his hands were trembling – not with cold or fear, but with pure rage. They were bunched into fists, one around Lionhart's hilt, the other a tight ball of leather, bone and straining tendons. His elbows were locked. He had to make a conscious effort to bend them. The moment he did, he surprised himself by raising the gunblade and hurling it into the ground.

It was a stupid thing to do. The point buried itself deep. This close to the crumbling edge, it could easily have caused the ground the break away under him.

He didn't care. For a few seconds he wasn't himself; he was just a roiling ball of pain, anger, frustration, and a profound sense of betrayal.

The betrayal always welled up, like pus from an old wound, whenever the subject of Commander Braig arose. Leon had lost his father, his mentor, his best friend, his home, his future, and his sense of self-worth in less than an hour, and had been living with the ramifications of that ever since. He would never be able to forgive Braig or the other traitors for their actions. It was one of the few constants he had left.

But this time the betrayal wasn't just about the Commander.

"You let me think you were dead," he hissed at the speck that was Cloud. "You can cross from world to world. You weren't stuck in one place. You could've found us. You could've let us know you were alive." Water dripped off his nose and plastered his hair to his head, revealing the dents in his skull he'd gained from his training and that final battle. "You have to let me help you now. You have to. I …" He choked on the words, but there was nobody else around to hear them. "I don't have anything else left that I can do to make up for … I can't make amends otherwise. I've been trying with the girls, and … but it's not working. I don't feel it. And I have to make amends. I have to make amends for not being able to … for not seeing before it was too … I was right there and I still couldn't do anything. All those people … the whole Garden ... my dad …"

He shook his head. He wasn't supposed to be angry at Cloud after Cloud had been through so much already. Cloud was damaged, just like they all were, but his brokenness showed on the outside, and for some reason that made Leon interminably angry with him.

"Cloud, you bastard. What else am I supposed to do? How else can I make up for not being able to save you the first time around? For not being able to save anyone?"

"You saved me."

Leon whirled.

"Not that I actually remember a whole lot of it," said Yuffie. "But Aerith told me the story." She cocked her head to one side at him. "She was worried about you coming up here alone."

"So she sent you?" He didn't bother keeping the incredulity from his voice.

Yuffie blew a raspberry. "Of course not. She doesn't know I'm here. She went to look for Tifa, who's gonna kick your butt for being all weepy up here on your own."

Aerith and Tifa had been friends before everything, but Aerith had barely known Cloud in Radiant Garden. They'd become acquainted during time spent with the healers after getting beaten up so often, but you couldn't really call that friendship – although the old Cloud probably would have. Cloud was eternally accepting and so friendly because he'd grown up being picked on. He understood what it was like to be bullied because you were different. He had endured it all his life in his home village, and had never judged Leon for being the top student, the best fighter in all the Royal Guard cadets, and yet still being trounced by his classmates.

The tendons in Leon's hands twanged.

"Go away, Yuffie."

"No."

"Yuffie -"

"You can't order me around. You're not the boss of me just because you're older."

The urge to lash out almost overwhelmed him. He blinked, shocked at himself. Yuffie wasn't so young she wanted to be carried everywhere, but she was still young enough that the urge to hit her made him disgusted at himself. Her spindly limbs were like toothpicks, and her wide dark eyes stared at him through the rain.

"He's gone, isn't he?" she asked.

"Yeah." Leon stared at the sky, empty save for falling raindrops. "I couldn't …" He shook his head. What was he doing, unburdening to an eight year old? "Never mind."

"You couldn't make him stay," Yuffie finished the sentence for him. "I don't think anyone could have. I never met him before now, but Cloud is all 'grr' and 'argh' about that Sephiroth character. I don't think even tying him down and drugging him would've stopped him if he really waned to go."

"Mrrf."

"Besides, haven't you, like, wondered why he was even here in the first place?"

"Huh?"

"If he's chasing this Sephiroth, and he came here when he didn't know we'd be in this world, maybe it's no wonder he wants to leave so bad. Maybe he's trying to protect us from this guy if he's so mega-super-special-with-whipped-cream BAD." Yuffie shrugged, linking her hands behind her and rocking back on her heels. "Or not. Maybe Cloud's just embarrassed he's not such a looker anymore. What would I know? I'm just a kid, right?"

Leon stared at her. Yuffie was many things, but 'just a kid' had never been one of them. He remembered first pulling her down off the pagoda roof in Radiant Garden, her slapping him with her open palms, only to declare she intended to marry him someday when they reached the ground. He remembered the way she'd overcome her nightmares in Traverse Town, even though she was so much younger than the rest of them, and the way she'd decided to honour her dead father by becoming the 'greatest-ninja-ever-you-see-if-she-didn't-so-nyer'. He also remembered the pranks she liked to pull on the rest of them, cackling as she made flour bombs, balanced buckets of water on doors, and secreted whoopee cushions on chairs before dinner, as if they had anything resembling a normal life now.

He looked once more at the last spot he'd seen Cloud, thoughts writhing like a basket of overturned snakes.

"Squaaaall, you're ignoring meeee!" Yuffie whined.

"It's Leon," he replied grimly. "C'mon. Let's get out of this rain."

To Be Continued …