Happy Early Birthday, Deplora!!

The reason that I wrote a birthday fic for Deplora is because she, out of everyone on the ENTIRETY of , always reads and reviews EVERY SINGLE SQUFFIE. Now isn't that something? She's completely amazing, a great person and an AWESOME writer, so Happy Birthday to her!

starts singing and then stops as glass breaks

Sorry 'bout that...

Yuffie hated Sunday mornings.

She wasn't exactly sure -why- she hated Sunday mornings, but for some reason that particular day of the week really irritated her. It might have been because Monday was the next day, and Monday meant that everything had to start over again, or because Sundays just felt lazy and long and exceptionally orange. Even on rainy days, she thought of Sunday as orange, and she didn't think that anything could ever change that opinion.

It happened to be Sunday morning when she was sitting on the roof of the Gizmo Shop, overlooking the empty streets of the Second District. Sometimes Aerith asked her why she looked at the Second District and not the First; there were far more people in the First District, Aerith said. For Yuffie, though, sitting and people-watching in the First District would be too ordinary, and Yufie was anything but ordinary.

For instance, she never ate breakfast on Sundays. When she did, it gave her indigestion because it was a Sunday, and Sunday just didn't seem like a breakfast day. On Saturdays she would sit herself down in the middle of the Green Room, on the floor by the foot of the bed in just a T-shirt, and make cereal. She would make a point of getting milk on the carpet becasue Squall hated it when she got milk on the carpet; something about the fibers sticking together. He shouldn't have told her this, because, naturally, she did it on purpose.

He also didn't like to see her running around in a T-shirt and her underwear, claiming it 'undecent'. When she challenged him about when he just wore his boxers or pants around, he said it was fine for a man because men weren't judged the same way as women were when it came to clotheslesness. This had made Yuffie really angry, but if she said any more, he would have stopped wearing just his boxers or pants around, and that would have been a very bad thing.

Now, though, Sunday morning felt exceptionally orange. Sure, her vision wasn't plated with the color and Traverse looked in no way orange, but orange for her was like honey; it meant that the day was moving slower than normal Sundays, that it was more hot and lazy than it should have been. To get away from the orangeness of the particularly wretched Sunday, she had gone to the roof of the Gizmo Shop, but now all she saw was the stars.

Yuffie had always been a sun person. Unlike Squall, who liked the nighttime, she would go outside whenever possible just to fight around in the sun. When she saw the stars on a morning (just like that morning), she felt out of place, wondering where the sun was when she knew perfectly well where it was. At times like these she missed Hollow Bastion the most, even though there were a lot of things about Traverse that were better than the castle-world of her home.

"Not this moping around again."

Yuffie nearly jumped out of her skin when Squall's baritone spoke up from the direction of the ladder. Spinning around, she glared at him and wagged a finger in his direction.

"Don't scare me like that," she chided, but he just rolled his eyes and walked up to stand next to her. After a few minutes of silence in which Yuffie fidgeted from being near him, she asked, "How'd you find me?"

"Aerith," he said, not caring to divulge further.

Yuffie's relationship with Squall They were more than just friends -- far more -- but she still walked carefully around him and he still treated her like a kid sometimes. She wasn't exactly sure what they could be called, but since she sometimes got up the nerve to kiss him good-night and he sometimes ignored his issues and kissed her good-morning, she supposed that they weren't too bad off.

"Well," she said, opting to enhance their conversation, "I was just thinking about Hollow Bastion and the sun. Because I really feel stupid sitting out here on a Sunday morning with no sun and it's just dumb, y'know? Sundays especially are supposed to have sun, and all we have are these stupid stars!"

Squall's voice was exceptionally quiet and Yuffie had to strain to hear what he said. "When we first came here, you loved the stars."

Yuffie's mouth closed with a snap. A few seconds passed before she asked incredulously, "You remember that?"

He nodded, tilting his head back so that he could look up at the stars that had been blinking out rapidly as of late. "Yeah. Hard to miss, what with you sitting on the bed that first night and pointing out at the stars and yelling 'I never saw that one before! Or that one!' I didn't get any sleep." He was complaining, but a small smile quirked the side of his mouth, and Yuffie grinned.

Leaning over, she gave his legs an impromptu hug before pulling away and looking back up at the sky. As she watched, another star flickered away, and her smile faded a bit. "Yeah, but now they're all going away," she said quietly.

"Isn't that what you wanted?" Squall asked scornfully, but Yuffie could tell that he wasn't as into it as he used to be.

"Not like that," she said, shaking her head. "I just wanted the sun back was all."

He shrugged. "You'll get it back soon enough." Without letting her get a word in edgewise, he dropped down and placed a kiss on the top of her head before turning and striding back to the ladder. He was gone before she had scrambled to her feet, and even when she did, she just stood there and hugged herself, a small, delirious smile on her face.

"I think I just did," she said to herself.

Suddenly Sunday wasn't looking so orange anymore.