As The World Falls Down.

i. hope, is the last thing one does before they are defeated.

When the sky fell down, they were taking advantage of Shinra's paranoia, and she was bored, bored, bored, and dying of boredom again and again, because Reeve said they should stay, and Cloud was going crazy, but wasn't he always crazy anyways?

And Rufus Shinra had a stick up his ass, and Tifa was beautiful, and Denzel and Marlene were scary thin and pale and thin, and she was sick, physically sick from worrying about Wutai and Red and rejecting Reno.

But Reno was an asshole who clearly had a thing for Elena, because you can't stare at someone's ass for that long and not have a thing for –

But. What's important is, they were locked up in the bunker, and Tifa was crying, and Cloud was crazy, and Yuffie had almost had sex with Vincent.

After OMEGA, their missions had become increasingly together, and Vincent actually had some twisted sense of humour buried in all those layers of angst, and she made him smile, once or twice, admittedly, and since when did Lucrecia had Yuffie's eyes? His dreams had always consisted of Lucrecia, and when her hair grew shorter and darker, and her eyes happy and mirthful, Vincent feared the worst.

And when Yuffie'd told him her Nevers, trapped in that bunker, itching to get outside and kill every single flea – or Heartless as Cloud so merrily put it – her face had been so close, and she was Yuffie, and off-limits and light.

And then her lips were hot on his, and he'd been waiting months for this, and she'd been waiting years, and years and her life was wasted waiting for him, but not wasted at all because he was beautiful and Vincent and danger.

But as always, he was the mature one, and realised it was wrong, and we shouldn't be, and stop Yuffie, stop.

And then the world fell down, because the Heartless got in, and they killed everyone, and no one could hear Aerith anymore, and Yuffie slashed her way through hundreds of them, and Tifa was crying because Barret and Marlene and Denzel were gone, and Vincent held her hand right until the last moment, and they had to split up, and she whispered,

"I love you."

And his eyes said it all, and they didn't say goodbye, because it wasn't goodbye, and Yuffie would see him again, or die trying.

And as the barracks collapsed, and Yuffie ran outside, the sky went black, and lily white hands clasped her own bleeding and rough ones, and there was a voice like honeysuckle and roses and please don't let me be dead!

And Aerith smiled and Yuffie fell asleep, or maybe she was unconscious or maybe in between. And when she woke up in Traverse Town, Aerith was alive, and Cid was so heartbroken, and Cloud's replacement in the role of emo, my life is shit, showed up, and there wasn't any materia here.

And when the world fell down, Vincent tumbled out of her reach, and she hopes to Leviathan that he's not lonely, because he doesn't deserve it, and she loves him.

And when she saw Cloud wearing his cloak, she punched him in the nose and stole it.

It still smells like him.

This oneshot was loosely based on Guardian1's But That Was In Another Country... but very loosely, as most of the details, excepting that of the underround barracks and the Heartless coming in through the pipes, are different. I really hope you enjoyed, and a review would be pure love (: