A/N: Red was always a favorite of mine, as was Yuffie, yet there's hardly anything written with them together just being friends. I had to help with that! I'm actually pretty happy with this piece, I hope you will be too!
Red and White
Sometimes when Red is sprawled out on the floor she sneaks up on him as if he couldn't hearsmell her from a mile away. She'll wrap her arms around him, sometimes throw a leg over his back to keep him from squirming away and bury her face in his mane. She inhales noisily.
"Red," she mumbles into his neck.
He sighs and shifts position so not quite so many bones jab into him. "Yuffie," he says back.
"You smell good. Like freedom and wind and – and – and cat."
He chuckle-purrs. "I'll take that as a complement."
"You should. I love cats. I have, like, a bazillion. You're just the awesomest one."
He rests his head on his paws and waits. She always says what's bothering her eventually.
It takes a few minutes of her fingering the beads and braids in his mane and adding some of her own before she talks again.
"Godo wants me to move back to Wutai," she says this time.
He is both surprised and not. They've known it was coming for a while, but she's still so young, barely past twenty and acting every bit the five year old still. He mourns, briefly, that the wildest one among them has the least avoidable duties. "Will you go?" is what he asks, after a few moments of bead clicking.
She shrugs awkwardly and mumbles, "I don't think I'll be able to leave again if I do."
He head butts her. "You can always leave. You are a Great Ninja after all."
She laughs. He pauses, then continues. "What does he want from you?"
"For me to get a taste of ruling. Like it's a food or something," she says scornfully, "like, once I try some I'll never want to stop. It's trade negotiations or something that he's offering right now."
"You'll do fine if you choose to take power. And Cosmo Canyon is always open to you."
She buries her face deeper into his neck and says something that sounds an awful lot like, "Thanks, Nanaki," before she pushes herself to her feet and dances away.
.
Later he finds her sitting on the edge of the canyon, legs dangling in the open air (the girl has always refused to know the meaning of fear).
He settles down next to her, close enough to grab the back of her shirt with his teeth should she fall, close enough to feel the heat of her body in the cool twilight air.
"Hey, Red," she says, legs kicking, heels going tap-tap-tap against the stone.
"Hello, Yuffie," he replies, head on his paws.
"The sunsets here are magnificent," she says, and gestures to the last streaks of brilliant orage on the horizon. "It's like the sky is on fire."
"It it quite stunning," he agrees.
She leans against him, draping an arm over his shoulders and staring at the sky. Her breath tickles his ears.
There are a few moments of peaceful silence as the last of the orange seeps from the sky. "I've always wanted to burn the world," she says. She pauses, knots her hand in his mane as if to anchor him there next to her, goes on. "But then I see things like this and I think, maybe, just maybe, the world's worth saving." A surprisingly bitter laugh. "I mean, of course I think the world's worth saving, or I wouldn't have helped save it the first time, let alone the next two. But," she pauses again, free hand out in front of her, palm towards them. She clenches it, watches the scars and callouses covering the palm flex and move. "But, you know, the first time, I thought it was Shinra that made everything so messed up. And the second time I thought, maybe we still haven't recovered, and the third time it was habit." She smiles, eyes crinkling at him., then sobers again. "There's none of those excuses anymore. We're all working so hard to fix the Planet, but people don't want to be fixed and I'm . . . kinda giving up." She pauses once more, and he can tell she's struggling with the words, something he's never seen her do before. Before they always marchedtumbledspurted out of her mouth, not always in the right order, but there. "Then I see things like this. And maybe, maybe people can't be fixed, but places are so damn beautiful and maybe I shouldn't want to destroy that and -" She breaks off, gulps, blinks back tears. "Leviathan, I don't know what I'm saying." She waves a hand. "Ignore me, please."
Instead he stretches out, shifts his haunches so they aren't bunched so uncomfortably and sticks his nose in her side. "I have often thought the same. That there is too much corruption and horror in this world to justify the effort we put into saving it. I don't want to burn the world." He twitches his tail so sparks jump. "I have enough fire in my life already. But I have often wanted to restart, remake, reboot." This time he pauses, gathering his thoughts (thrown higgldy-piggldy by Yuffie, they need collecting before vocalization). "Occasionally, however, there are moments of beauty, of kindness, of good, and I think myself a monster for wanting to destroy it. Then, I think that those perfect moments should be valued all the more highly, because of the suffering around them."
She smiles, sad and sweet, and wild and freer than he'll ever be, and so, so Yuffie that it almost hurts (one of those perfect moments, her face thrown into soft shadow by the light of his tail, the edging of orange on the horizon not quite gone yet and he almost thinks he sees the woman she'll be).
"I don't think I understood everything you said, but you said it so much better than I did, that I'll agree anyway."
He chuckles and rests his head on her knee. She lets her hand move towards his head and scratches the spot behind his ear that always makes him feel like a true cat. "Maybe I said it poorly. Suffice it to say I was agreeing with you."
"Oh." She bites her lip, thinking. "Good. I wouldn't have wanted to have said it all for nothing."
Once again they sit in silence as the very last of the sun rimming the horizon leeches away and the world goes gray and soft and shadowy. The two are thrown into sharp relief by the flame on Nanaki's tail.
Yuffie buries her nose in his mane. "Red?"
"Yes?"
"If I asked pretty please would you be one of my advisors when I become Empress?"
He stiffens. "Yuffie . . . I do not wish to leave Cosmo Canyon."
"You wouldn't have to!" she says, voice desperately cheery. "I could just call you up or come visit you." A pause. "It's just, you're one of the smartest people I know, and I need someone I know is looking out for me as a person."
He realizes how lonely she is, all of a sudden. Even AVALANCHE mainly saw her as an immature brat, and many times more of a nuisance than an asset, no matter what she did. And if her friends saw her that way, how would the rest of the world see her? The Princess who would not settle, who had given everything but would not take the responsibilities offered. The tag along to the heroes, too young to have done what she claimed. The sense of pity it overwhelming, but he also knows how much she hates being pitied.
His new revelations do not come through in his voice. "As long as I could retain autonomy, I would be happy to."
She sits up and smiles a smile so big and sincere his heart breaks for her all over again. How could such a friendly, talkative person be so alone? She gives him a small seated bow, and he has another realization. She expected him to say no. She would have gone to a council that did not see her as a person without any support whatsoever if he had, and yet she did not expect him to say yes.
"Thank you Nanaki. Of course you can stay here. You aren't a subject, just a helpful friend."
He growls assent and pulls himself to his feet, letting her use him as support as she gets back onto solid ground. They walk back to his cave together, her occasionally grabbing at the flame on his tail, and him flicking it out of the way every time.