A/N: Written in response to the prompt: "Ashamed of all my somethings".
The members of AVALANCE all had their reasons for wanting to spill Sephiroth's blood. Back in the Northern Crater that fateful night, vengeance is what steeled their hearts, drove their weapons forward devoid of mercy. They carried their reasons with them into battle. To save the planet. To fell ShinRa's most prized warrior. For their loved ones. For a fallen friend. For some, a secret.
It was assumed by many that her reason was for her father. To seek retribution for his murder at Sephiroth's hand. Perhaps, it was to give her closure and peace for all the wrongs that were done to her broken homeland. These were good guesses.
She was very young that night that it happened. She was shaken awake by her nursemaid. Panic was written across her face as she dragged her out of bed and threw a robe at her.
She had simply said, "The beacons are lit. Hurry Yuffie."
The beacons were lit. Even with ShinRa's evil war closing in on Wutai on all its sides, she had never imagined that her own home, this impenetrable castle, would ever become a dangerous place. She had lived her short life playing within these walls, hidden to the suffering just outside of them. War might have been in her homeland for all the years she has been alive, but she had never met war face to face.
But the beacons were lit. Indeed she saw the fires blazing on top of the walls from outside her window. Run they said, the enemy is here, run.
Her socked feet were slipping on the slick shiny floors as her small legs hurried to keep up with her nursemaid. The servants were screaming, panic was in the halls of her home and outside she heard the sound of steel meeting steel.
Yuffie couldn't remember if she was afraid that night or not.
Her nursemaid flew around corner after corner until finally they stopped in a small room. It was a room off of the royal throne room, the place where she was forced to sit beside her father during the long boring talks and the silly ceremonies. Her nursemaid was frantically closing the door and dropping the locks into place.
How long they were huddled in that tiny room together, she does not recall. She just remembers the screams she heard. The screams of women, of panic. Something in those voices compelled her to run.
She does not remember how she managed to get away from her nursemaid and throw open the door. She just dashed into the throne room as fast as her slippery socks would allow.
This is where her memory does not betray her. Her father, the proud Emperor of Wutai, bleeding on his throne, his body slumped over, without life, his arm huddled protectively over a few prized ancient materia. The servants cowering in a corner, eyes widened in horror at her appearance in the room.
And him. Yes she remembers him well. The cold startling green eyes, the black clothing, the sword longer than her.
He stood beside the body of her father and he looked at her. Her childhood self stood there, meeting the ShinRa's General's, "the demon of Wutai's", and the killer of her father's gaze. She remembers his voice, low and flat. He said directly to her, "Wutai has been defeated." She stood there, the child princess of Wutai staring up into his eyes. After an amount of time she could not measure, the General scooped up the materia from underneath her father's arm, turned his back and walked out of the room.
In the Northern Crater, looking into those same green eyes, those childhood memories were not playing through her mind. No, if her friends assumed that it was her father's name on her lips when she screamed her battle cry that night, they were wrong.
"Yuffie!" came Tifa's voice in an irritated tone, snapping Yuffie back to the present. "There were two materia on this counter earlier this morning, and now they are gone…?"
Yuffie liked the way materia glowed, how it lit up a dark room in faint speckles of light. The more you had, the brighter the glow. The more you had, the stronger you were, the harder it became to dismiss you.
A little girl back in Wutai rolling the stolen materia in her hands underneath her covers, watching the way the shadows moved in the soft glow. Her father wouldn't come in here to find her awake this late. He never did.
Never, that was the word with her father. When her mother died when she was very young, her father never stepped in to fill in the emptiness left behind. He never played with her or laughed with her like her mother did. They never told each other stories, never had any inside jokes, never talked a lot at all. The mighty Emperor of Wutai never hugged his daughter in public.
The magic of materia was not taught to young children, the princess of Wutai was no exception. Materia was hidden away, a secret thing that only the adults could know. She would sneak into the royal stores when she could escape her nursemaid and grab a few of the tiny balls. She liked to pick out the prettiest colors she could find the fastest, the ones that glowed the brightest.
Under her covers she would use the faint light to read the guide books of Materia. She would grasp one in her palms and squeeze her eyes tight in concentration, trying to understand the magic. Trying to become powerful to make her father proud, so he would look at her. Trying to be someone more than just a silly girl in her father's eyes.
That never happened. He died protecting the beloved materia of Wutai, not her. She was not seeking to avenge her father the night that meteor was falling, she never was.
"Yuffie!" Tifa snapped again. "What do you have in your right pocket?"
"Something…?" Yuffie replied in a playful voice, avoiding answering Tifa's question once more.
Tifa threw her hands up in frustration, "Ugh! Fine! Just leave the materia on the counter before you leave and I'll pretend this never happened." She turned and marched out of the room to answer a phone ringing upstairs.
She waited until she heard Tifa greeting whoever it was on the phone. She reached into her pocket and pulled that "something", the two small stolen materia out. She set them on the counter with a soft thud and stared into their blue light, seeing again for a moment her father's face.
She turned from them and walked out of the room, ashamed.