Disclaimer: All I own is a cat and she'd argue the point.
When The Night Falls Down
Ever had a dream where you know it's your life, your friends and your family, but everything seems a little...off? I mean, yeah, that's your house, but the waterslide from the second-story window to the pool out back? That's new. And yeah, that is your best friend, but you really don't recall him owning anything like that outfit. I mean, studded leather? Where the hell would he have gotten studded leather?
Kairi's thoughts wandered into tangents like this every time she saw Yuffie.
See, Yuffie is like one of those dreams, the ones where everything is not-quite-right, like somebody's telling a story about you but with all the little details wrong.
The first time Kairi saw Yuffie, the older girl was driving down the road in her pick-up truck, her dog in the truck bed with a bandanna 'round it's neck. The country girl from movies like Dukes of Hazzard. Only the pick-up wasn't red, it was black with silver racing stripes and a dragon painted on the hood. Only the dog wasn't a Golden Retriever, it was an old, mean-looking, three-legged Irish Wolfhound that looked like he barely fit in the truck bed. And the bandanna wasn't a nice, respectable red- it was a rainbow bandana. And Yuffie wasn't singing along sweetly to country music- no, she was belting out Megadeth's Wanderlust at the top of her lungs.
"I've got a lust for wan-der-ing, branded deeper than the bone!"
Maybe it was the fact that those were the first words Kairi heard out of Yuffie's mouth that lent all her interactions with Yuffie such a sense of urgency.
The second time she saw her, Yuffie was sitting in a diner just off the road in to the little town of Himmel. That was when she got a good look at the girl herself and realised that even Yuffie's attire was slightly off. She was dressed in a bright red, loose T-shirt with a hand-drawn dragon splayed across the back, matching the one on her truck, and block lettering on the front that displayed the words "I'm gonna live forever or die in the attempt." There was an unnecessary belt slung over the shirt with a dragon buckle, and even her paint-stained jeans had a dragon scrawled up one side. She leaned across the counter at Cid's Diner and joked and laughed with Cid, before he laughed and slid back her order- not anything Kairi would have expected the girl to order, based on her quick glimpses of her personality, but a banana split. She took it to a booth near the window, where she shared with, of all people, her dog. Yuffie gave the dog the banana and ate the rest of the ice cream.
Kairi's sense of urgency increased.
The third time she saw Yuffie, Kairi was just finalizing. her move into Himmel. Yuffie stood in the parking lot of the nearby supermarket, talking to two men and laughing. One of them was tall and dark-haired and didn't smile much, wearing nothing but plain black. The other was shorter and smiled a lot, dressed in a Guns'n'Roses T-shirt, and had gravity-defying blonde hair. Like Yuffie, the two looked slightly off.
Kairi found, to her surprise, that she was slightly jealous.
And the urgency reached its pitch, and that's how Kairi met Yuffie.
"Hi, I'm Kairi. I just moved here and I'm looking for a place to stay..."