This is how it is, simple and complete:
She's a mountain girl, and it shows off so well in the high sharp keen of blades that were made for cutting into thin cold air.
She left home at twelve and hasn't settled down since. She fits into the world like a brick through a window and she loves, loves the trouble that comes to her, unbidden, like a swarm of bees to a sticky spill of honey on a summer's day.
But no, scratch that unbidden right out of the books, because she has a waspish nature and when she finds trouble, she dives right into it. Calluses, scraped knees and boots that dwarf her skinny ankles-
Maybe, at midnight, she happened to be in a hotel corridor, a pagoda-hotel, and maybe some plutocrat's hired muscle left out a row of boots for a tight-faced native to polish in the dark of night – maybe, maybe, that was a lazy act of revenge for the death of her warrior-nation.
When she comes home now to visit, the cats wind around her ankles; once, a tourist called her puss-in-boots.
Cut to the city, shot in black and white. This scene has a bite to it, if you're sentimental. Small girl, crouched low to the ground against low buildings and wide roads that run flat and straight out to forever past miles and miles of auto repair, grocery, hair salon, pawn shop, you name it: whatever she's been searching for, this it is not. Sad picture, if the girl were anyone but her. The grin on her face is as wide and bright as a sharpened knife.
Little girl, mountain goat, Wutai flea, what brought you here?
Yuffie wishes she'd seen Midgar before its fall, no matter how much she might have pretended to hate the place; it's Shinra she hated, and she regrets not seeing the beast they built before it was brought to its knees. She would have run giddily through it, if she were braver then, and sneaked and lied and cheated her way through the city until she'd discovered every secret it held and brought it home to Wutai.
Now she'd picking slowly through the ruins of old Midgar, a city she's never seen in his glory, turning his bones over to find the places where the bodies are buried-
-it comes back to her sometimes, in flashes, what happened to her deep down here, how she was dragged screaming from the void and left alone and too scared to blink in case the dark came back. Now there's a bedtime story for freaks-
-if she'd ever cared about sweet Midgardian fairytales, she'd say this wasn't much of one. But there's one her mother used to tell about a sly, pale-faced fox-wife who changed names and faces with every breath and who tore men's hearts out leaving them gasping and broken in the middle of some empty wood-
-they carried pearls in their hands which did their bidding-
-so day after day she goes back, searching, searching, in a terrible slow fumbling hurry, and after she has found what she needs to find, she is going to reach in and root out every last bit of Shinra that lingers there.
She has never believed that if you love something, you should let it go.
This needs to not be my OTP.