A/N: Geez, you write a stunning reveal chapter where one of the characters turns out to be a villain all along, and everyone just yawns and waits for the next one. I have a theory that the kind of people who read stories about sassy lions with British accents would rather read about British lions being sassy than stunning reveals about villainous snakes.

With that said, I have for you a chapter featuring a sassy British lion! What luck.

(Disclaimer: Sassy British lions may not actually be all that sassy in this particular chapter)

When Kion heard steps on the grass behind him, his first thought was that one of the lionesses had come to ask more questions, but when he turned he saw that it was Scar instead. His mane was a tangle of matted hair pointing in every direction, there were scratches all over his face and his expression was decidedly unamused.

"Did Sarabi…"

"Don't ask," said Scar. He turned and headed towards the secret lair of the Lion Guard, which at this point was probably not all that secret anymore. "We need to do a little séance before I leave."

"A séance?" Kion struggled to get up and follow after him, his paws aching from having lain on top of them while he rested. "What do you mean?"

"We still need to see if we can talk to Zazu, remember? In addition to allowing him to once again rejoice in the sound of his own voice, it would be good to see if we can finally find out more about the afterlife, since poor Zira seems to be stuck here with me." He roughly brushed the vines covering the entrance aside, not seeming to care much if he left the gap exposed for all to see. "Besides, there was that whole matter with you radiating starlight, remember? We, ah, rather need to look into that."

"Right," said Kion, following him into the cavern. Normally the walls of the cave were lit up through the gaping chasm in the roof, but the sun was too low by now for that to matter. Kion stared up at the crevice in wonder, tracing the gap between the cliff-sides all the way up to the shattered peak of Pride Rock.

"To think that you did all of that in your fight with my dad… The Elder Roar really is something special, isn't it?"

"That wasn't me," said Scar, "and it wasn't Zira either. What you're looking at is the work of your great grandfather, Ahadi, who named me Trash and my brother King. He was willing to destroy all the Pridelands just to get back at me for killing his favoured son, and he possessed the strength of will to do it all from beyond the grave." He fixed Kion with a narrow stare, his green eyes gleaming in the darkness. "In the end he managed to possess your father, Simba, by taking advantage of the boy's own rage and lack of discipline. And it almost destroyed us all."

Kion swallowed. "You think – you think that's what happened to me? That King Ahadi possessed me while I was fighting Shenzi and the others, and that's what caused me to lose control of the Roar?"

"Ahadi has always hated the hyenas." Scar plucked one of the gourds from the string on his neck, and set to work reducing its contents to a fine paste. "Just like he always hated me. Correspondingly, the times when you lost control were when you were fighting me and when you were fighting hyenas. And, when he controlled Simba directly, he was able to control not just the basic elements but even light itself." He gestured with one paw as he worked, indicating a corner of the cave where strange claw-like appendages rose up from the stone floor, clasping an empty spot in the middle where a searing heat had left a scorch mark on the ground.

Kion looked at the sight in horror. "What… what can we do to stop him?"

"My first thought was to teach you to master your abilities," said Scar, drawing a tendril of water from the central pool and working the liquid into the red substance. "After all, Ahadi cannot possess you if you are strong enough to resist his will. Now, however, I am starting to think there is more to it than that." He flicked his claws, and a spark of fire burst forth, causing the paste to smoulder. "Here, breathe this in. I am sure Zazu would love to enlighten us with some profound wisdom from beyond the grave. No betting on whether he has already conquered the afterlife for us in the meantime."

Kion reluctantly breathed in the noxious fumes. It was not the first time he had done this training, but the idea of allowing some strange substance to control him had never ceased to unnerve him.

"Okay, now what?"

"Focus," said Scar. "Try to establish a connection with him. You should be able to recognize the sensation by now."

Kion frowned, and tried to picture the strange blue bird who had been his commander for that one brief mission, but who he had otherwise only known as his father's majordomo. "Right," he said. "It's just… I don't really know what I should be focusing on."

"Just think about what he's like," Scar said irritably. His own eyes were scrounged shut. "His personality, what he believed in, things like that. You must have learned a thing or two about him while he served under your father."

"Right," Kion said again. He thought back to what Zazu said about wanting to survive the death of the planet so that he could straddle its corpse and eat it. "I'm just not sure if any of that was really him."

"Just give it a moment. Don't give up so bloody easily!" Scar's nostrils twitched as he breathed in more of the pungent fumes, and his pupils dilated visibly. "You're just like your father… the moment things don't go your way, you turn your back on the things you care about. You pretend that if you just ignore your problems and keep them out of sight, they'll go away."

"That's not what my father is like at all," Kion protested. "You're just bitter about being banished on account of your actions. And I don't believe you and Sarabi really hate each other either, based on how you act." He narrowed his eyes. The fumes were definitely clouding his senses, but he thought he could see his granduncle more clearly than ever. "You keep telling me that you have to be honest about your feelings in order to master the elements, but every single wielder of the Roar I've met is as delusional as can be! I don't think you're being honest with your feelings at all."

"Be quiet," Scar grunted. "I have to focus."

"I don't buy it at all," he continued. There was a tiny smouldering ember floating around Scar's head, which he supposed could have emanated from the burning red fruit, but Kion was no longer so easily fooled. "It seems to me that what gives you power isn't awareness of your feelings, but rather having those strong feelings in the first place. It's your connections to others that you draw upon that gives you strength, just like how you're drawing on Zira right now. And if so, maybe that's what Mufasa meant in his vision, when he told me that-"

Scar's eyes flashed open. "A vision? You had a vision of my brother? And you didn't tell me?"

"Uh," said Kion, trying to gather his thoughts. "It kind of just… slipped my mind for a second?"

Scar pushed himself up. "Fool boy! This could change everything. Do you have any idea how hard knowledge of the afterlife is to come by? Even after years of research, I scarcely know more than when I started. Tell me what he told you, what triggered it, what it looked like, everything!"

"Right," Kion said hastily, trying to remember all the details. "It was after my dad asked grandfather for advice on whether to let me go to the Outlands. I was thinking about…"

"Grandfather, I know my father trusts me, but he needs someone he can truly look up to…"

He swallowed. "I thought about how my dad felt about him, as well as about you and everyone else, and asked if he could say something to him in reply."

"Simba, my son. I cannot… there is so much I want to say, but my power is waning. I must hold him back. I cannot… I cannot hold on any longer. He is coming."

"I felt a connection," he whispered, "and then I saw the Constellation of the Lion, and I heard grandfather's voice say that he had to hold him back." He had been trying to warn them about King Ahadi, it had to be. "Then he addressed dad and said that he had forgotten him." It had seemed like such a cruel thing for such a wise king to say. He almost had not repeated that part to his father. "And then he said that his power was waning, and he could not hold on any longer…"

By the time Kion was done, Scar was staring at him with unnervingly large, unblinking green eyes. No, that was not quite right: Rather, Scar was looking straight past him, as if he was not there at all.

"Simba, you have forgotten me…" The old lion started pacing around the cave. "That's the exact same thing he said in the vision Rafiki conjured, all that time ago. I thought it had just been a trick, that the old Mandrill was trying to control him. But now… no, I've been a fool to let myself think that. An utter fool!"

"He was trying to warn us," Kion said in a small voice. "Wasn't he?"

"Yes, but in more ways than you think." Scar drew in a breath. "You have forgotten me… my power is waning. I thought Mufasa would never have been so pointlessly cruel to his only son, and so I dismissed it out of hand. But my brother was trying to tell us exactly why he did not sound like himself." He looked at Kion with a forlorn expression. "You fool boy… it looks like you were right after all."

"The power of spirits comes from their connections," Kion said, swallowing. The realizations were rushing in faster than he wanted to hear them, but he had long learned to reject that instinctive desire to flinch away from uncomfortable truths. "And if you have a powerful connection to another soul, then you can use that as a kind of anchor to stop yourself from dissipating after death. But if they forget about the kind of person you really were, then that connection is corrupted, or vanishes entirely..."

"Which is why we never heard again from Rafiki or the others," Scar whispered, staring at the crimson ember that floated aimlessly in front of him before settling upon his open paw like a sleepy kitten. "It is not about your own strength of will, but whether or not there is anything left to tie you to this world..."

The implications were coldly, cruelly clear. "But, but you must have had some kind of connection with Zazu, right? I mean, you two have known each other for so long. There has to be something."

But Scar kept staring at the naked flame in his paw, and said nothing. There was a desperate longing that radiated from that fiery wisp, which Kion could only now sense, almost as if the two were not physically touching at all. Like there was a whole world between them, and no amount of travel could bring them any closer…

"I'll go get dad," Kion said quickly. "He… Zazu served under him for him for ages. He has to have some kind of connection to him. He has to."

"Zazu never connected with anyone," Scar whispered. "Never showed his true self to anybody. Always hiding behind a carefully constructed mask of cynicism…"

"It's got to be worth a try," Kion said in desperation. "It's like you said: You should at least think about it for a few minutes before deciding that something is impossible. There's still hope–"

"Hope." Scar burst out laughing, and the sound was so sudden and harsh that Kion nearly jumped. "Hope! Zazu always said that hope is what you resort to when you no longer have anything left to believe in. There is nothing left to hope for but hope itself. How very right he was."

Kion stared at his granduncle, stared at the old legend who was the most powerful being in the Pridelands, perhaps the most powerful animal that had ever lived. Now, he seemed tired, drained of life. Even his lustrous coat of fur could no longer hide the tired folds of skin which hung over his skeletal frame. He seemed… old.

Kion decided in that moment that he did not like those crimson fumes very much, which were even now filling the air around them. He did not like what they did to people, and he did not like what they revealed underneath.

"You know," he said, "I never really liked Zazu. He seemed weird and cynical and he said strange things just to get a rise out of people. But most of all I didn't really get him at all. He was just done telling me that the only thing he cared about was dying last, and then a moment later he told me to go get to safety so he could fight Shenzi for me. Why did he do that, granduncle?"

Scar shrugged with bony shoulders. "Honour, duty, or some other sense of obligation. I don't know; it's not as if I understand those traits either."

"Yes you do! You understand better than anyone. You killed my grandfather to become king, but then you let my father live even though he was the single greatest threat to your claim. You cared for him, tried to protect him, even fought a living god to try and shield him all by yourself. And now you're back in the Pridelands for the first time since before I was even born, and you still haven't said a word to him. Why? Why can't you just be honest with yourself?"

"I don't know," said Scar. He was gazing at the fumes, casting his scarred face in a crimson sheen. "To avoid having to feel the things I feel, perhaps. To avoid having to face the fact that in all likelihood, everyone I care about will die no matter what I do. I suppose I must have already known that, all along."

Kion grit his teeth, an irrepressible fury welling up deep inside of him. There was no reason to give up, not when they had already achieved so much. There was no reason…

Weak / pathetic

He stared at that hollow, empty husk of a lion, which lay there defeated, clutching an image of the past like so many other animals before him. He hated that sight, hated that sad, pathetic image of defeat.

Unworthy trash / what a waste

There was a faint light illuminating the cave in a golden glow. Kion looked up and saw that the Constellation of the Lion was shining down through the hole above, but that was not where the light came from. It was him. He was radiating starlight.

"I hate you," he said, tasting the words. "All that power and all that wisdom, but you don't use it for anything good. You give in to your fear and anger and bitterness and in the end you just… give up."

Scar was inching back now, his tired old face lined with dread. He did not say anything, but just backed into a corner of the cave, and stayed there, like an animal waiting to die.

"I hate you," Kion said again. A lioness appeared in front of Scar, young and fair, with a dark mark on her brow. She stared back at him, unflinching. The cave around them was gone, leaving nothing but a vast, empty expanse of grass and starlight. He took a deep, ragged breath. "You can just… go to hell!"

He turned around and Roared at his enemy, roared with all his fury at the golden lion that had appeared behind him. The raw force of his will smashed into the manifestation, shattering the image of Ahadi into stardust, until finally the winds rose and swept it all away, leaving only silence.

Kion crashed down in the centre of the cave, and lay there, crying quietly for a while.