Oooh, I am in such a tizzy! My muses are certainly active today! Yeah, I got this idea when I was eating dinner. Aforementioned in "Going Down". And I am happily munching cake right now, as it was my mother's birthday yesterday, after dinner. And that is not a lie. Neither the cake nor the fact that I am eating it OM NOM NOM NOM NOM. Not one of my best works, but eh.
It was the best thing that had ever happened to her. Like, seriously.
Yuffie woke up with a Great Idea (capitalized, you know, just to show how Great it was) and decided to implement it in honor of the close landing of the Highwind. Because she was just that glad.
She flounced out of her "bedroom" (the chocobo stable, really, but no one called it that: she roomed with Vincent in there because when they had called dibs on rooms Vincent, like always, had been silent, and she was too busy being preoccupied with the bile doing the tango in her esophagus, up down up down, to protest) and cheerily entered the bridge. She beamed like the sun just after a rain, much to everyone's dismay. That, to them, signaled Something Bad. (Again, capitalized, just to show how Bad it was. Like, Meteor-apocalypse-deadAeris kind of bad, not look-at-my-bling-yo kind of bad.)
Yuffie flung her arms out joyously. "GOOD MORNING, STRIFE!" she roared.
"JUBILATIONS, LOCKHEART!"
"Er, hello, Yu-"
"GUTEN FUCKIN' MORGAN, HIGHWIND!"
"You little br-"
"OHAYO, WALLACE AND WALLACE!"
"BONJOUR, NOT-HERE-GAINSBOROUGH!"
"早, SITH AND MASTER!" Yuffie attempted to cup her hand over her oracular cavity and breathed heavily, but ended up making out with the Knights of the Round summon materia she had swiped from Cloud's pocket earlier.
The robot burbled unhappily, unable to do anything else – his wires had short-circuited from the enormous energy generated by Yuffie's enthusiasm. A string of nonsensical fortunes had spouted from his printer.
'You will be hungry again in an hour.'
'Your lunch will be stolen by a hungry Zemzelett.'
'Pass on this chain fortune or you will die in 24 hours – of starvation.'
"Buenos días, …XIII!" Yuffie pronounced "XIII" strangely, probably because she said it the wrong way, as in "ex-I-I-I" rather than "thirteen". This ended up making her look rather foolish, sortakinda like Vincent with a one of those puny tiny pop guns. Well, at least it didn't make him look like he was overcompensating for something.
And then she noticed that Vincent wasn't there, either with or without his little pop guns. Yuffie left the bridge as quick as she had come and went up to the deck. As sure as the bread had burnt in the toaster that morning, Vincent was up there, fiddling with his Death Penalty, his cloak billowing out around him. For a second, she wished she had a cloak to billow around, and then her mind kicked in to remind her of her goal of the day, which, incidentally, happened to be the Great Idea she had had.
A crooked smile moseyed over her face (with some difficulty, as it had to get over her nose and avoid her rather sharp teeth) as she watched him.
"Morning, Valentine," she murmured to him in a sultry voice, though with Yuffie's thin vocal cords, it came out as inaudible. She gave up on the inaudible sultry and went for all-too-audible loud.
"MORNING, VALENTINE!"
Vincent turned around slowly. "Hello, Yuffie," he said cautiously. "Why did you call me by my last name? It is most unusual for you."
Yuffie grinned devilishly and edged closer. She crouched down and whispered conspiratorially in his ear. Vincent, against his better sense, was curious and leaned in to listen.
"Now, now, Valentine, you didn't think I'd tell you why that soon, did you?" Yuffie jumped up and went back up to the stable as fast as she could, cackling. Vincent didn't catch the faint pink on her cheeks when she had whipped around.
"Strife, pass me the Behemoth steak."
Cloud wordlessly passed Yuffie the Behemoth steak.
Lunchtime in Junon was an awkward time for AVALANCHE. Yuffie was calling everyone by their last names, and no one knew why. Just that, apparently, this was Yuffie's Great Idea and their Something Bad. Really, it was rude for someone much younger than them to call them by their last names. Oh, well. This was probably just a Phase.
It was dark in the Chocobo stable, and the straw, though covered with blankets, was itchy. Yuffie couldn't sleep. She tossed and turned, flipping over and over and over like a pancake trying not to get burnt on any one side.
"Vinnie?"
"…Yes, Yuffie?"
Her hand found Vincent's human one and she scooted over. She could barely see, in the faint light from the window, Vincent's features, but his red eyes stood out against the dark as clear as the stream that ran through the middle of her beloved Wutai.
"I only carried out that Great Idea I had today because I wanted your attention. I mean, who ever heard of Yuffie Kisaragi calling everyone by their last names like some grizzled old soldier-man?"
"I see."
Yuffie hesitated, then threw caution to the winds, in typical Yuffie fashion. Nevertheless, she tucked her head under Vincent's chin shyly, against his chest with his abnormally slow heartbeat, and gently wrapped her arms around him. She listened to him breathe, slow and deep, and wondered what she was doing and whether she had just smashed everything to hell.
Vincent had paused suddenly. What is she doing? She had, with all her chaotic antics and kleptomaniac ways, unknowingly wormed her way into his heart (whatever was left of it, anyway) without his awareness, and had done strange things to it; he was feeling things he had not felt in a long while. Not since his long sleep in the Shinra basement. He would have objected strongly to any involvement with her, but something in him was tired of playing the martyr, and he acknowledged that Yuffie, as young as she was, was not pure and innocent or naïve. So he let go, and decided to live in the moment, and somewhere, Lucrecia smiled.
Yuffie felt a weight settle around her waist and realized it was an arm, and her hair ruffled under Vincent's breath as he settled his chin on her head. Vincent was not a man of many words, and Yuffie knew this was his nonverbal acceptance, and inside, she rejoiced.
"Vincent?"
"Yes?" he murmured, and the sound of his voice sent Yuffie's stomach into doing cartwheels and backflips.
"I like you." And after a while, as if it weren't enough: "A lot."
Yuffie heard his smile and felt it, and he inclined his head to kiss her hair, and then her forehead, and then her nose.
"I know".
Whoah. Okay, so, that was completely unexpected. Bah. Stupid twists. It just came out this way. I sort of had writer's block in the middle. Sorry for the lack of plot. The idea of Yuffie yelling last names was just an amusing thing to me. And so I wrote it. Not one of my best, I'm sure.
And yeah. The first fortune? That was a real fortune that my friend got from a fortune cookie. Yes. "You will be hungry again in an hour."
Peace out.