Fandom: Final Fantasy VII
Character/s: Yuffie, Vincent, Cait Sith
Words: 662
Notes: 50k30days, Oct 13th. Happy Birthday, Vincent! I totally made that fortune up, but it's yours now, so run with it. Kudos to those of you who catch the saxophone reference.
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He didn't know quite what to make of it when she ran out ahead of them, exclaiming about snake skin, and he had no idea of how to deal with her saddened expression at the brittle circle of snake bones, flesh withered and rotting into dust.
"It's dead," she sighed, and crouched next to it, frowning. "Too bad." There was a brief moment of silence, one gloved finger dabbling in the dust beside the frail-looking corpse, and then she was scooping up the body with both hands, glancing about herself with narrowed eyes. "There's a stream that way, right? Can you hear it?"
He could, but didn't understand why she was asking, didn't ask, as was their custom. She jerked her head at him. "This way for a sec, Vinnie. I wanna do something. You can stay here," she added, poking her tongue out at Cait Sith. The moogle stomped one huge, irrational foot, and charged off into the undergrowth after the ninja, leaving Vincent to follow in their trail.
When he arrived at the stream's edge, Cait was yowling about how it was unfair to splash the robot and what if his motherboard got wet and he turned into the meanest terminator they'd ever seen, and Yuffie was crouched in the water, freeing the snake's vertebrae from the shreds of skin that clung to them. He stood watching her for a few seconds, waiting until she felt the need to explain.
"There," she said at last, and swirled her glove through the water in something that looked suspiciously like a holy sign, dispelling the remains of the snakeskin and sending it rippling downstream along the surface of the water. She turned to Cait. "Now I'll show you real fortune-telling, saxophone-head." (Cait had once predicted that if Yuffie ever sneezed and wasn't blessed afterward, she'd turn into a saxophone. Yuffie, disliking saxphones, had taken this amiss.)
She took the bones in her two hands and she closed her eyes and spread them on the surface of the water. To Vincent's surprise, they were light enough to float - some of them, anyway. The head sunk to the bottom, along with a few of the vertebrae further down. Strangely, the jaw detatched itself halfway down, and returned to the surface. Yuffie prodded it, raising her eyebrows.
"Okayyy, so apparently something important to our motivation's gonna go a little bit pear-shaped," she said, collecting the head from the shallow bottom. "But we'll be okay, because we're stubborn like that. Tough choices... alliance shifts..." she was muttering to herself, now, more than them. "But we'll achieve our goals, because the tail's still floating."
Cait's whiskers twitched. "Bone-reading, huh? That's a little creepy for Gold Saucer, but you could set up a table in the Hotel and no one'd be any the wiser. You kind of look like a witch--ow, ow, let go, that's delicate, ow," he added in a desperate squawk as Yuffie's hand closed on his tail. She smiled brightly, pinched his nose, and stole his crown, pocketing the bones again.
"Well, I'm done. Let's get a move on!" She pegged the crown into the forest ahead of them - Cait gave her a look of utmost fury, which was not as impressive with whiskers, and charged off after it - and Vincent crossed his arms thoughtfully.
"Is there a reason I remember there being something special about the eighth vertebra turning upside-down?" he queried smoothly, and she stilled for an instant.
"Nope," was the nonchalant reply. "That just means we're lost. I told you we should've gone north around that cliff, but we'd better just keep on going this way, now." The fact that she had turned a light shade of pink was, Vincent thought, supremely unconvincing. But he was willing to let her get away with it, for now. There were rules about snake bones and their holders, he remembered, and there were certain beings whose wrath he'd never care to rouse.