Playing Pretend

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Yuffie had always loved to play pretend, ever since she was very small. The hyperactive five-year-old would force Squall into demure little tea parties with no crockery or silverware, go outside to pick non-existent bouquets of sweet-smelling flowers for Aerith – sometimes she'd even hog-tie Cloud and make him to play 'ninjas'.

Who cared if Squall stubbornly insisted the tea party was stupid because there was no tea and Aerith already had a beautiful garden and Cloud wouldn't ever try and just said it was childish?

It didn't matter if they didn't try because Yuffie always tried for them (and that's what friends were for).

When they got too old to play pretend with her anymore – Squall ('it's Leon') was off fighting and Aerith was off healing and who knew where the hell Cloud was anymore – it still didn't matter because she'd always had a good imagination. The fantasies grew larger and wilder still ('I'm the Great Ninja Yuffie') and she was perfectly happy all by herself, thank you very much.

And then she met Roxas.

He said he was a nobody with no heart and no feelings and no emotion, but this didn't stop Yuffie. All those years ago her friends had never wanted to play her games but they did anyway, and he we was going to join in one way or another.

She found she talked more than usual around him, flailing her arms around, trying to make him laugh. She dragged him around behind her like a doll, showing him every nook and cranny of Traverse Town. She brought him to her favourite café and sat staring at him, toying with a forkful of strawberry cheesecake.

"Yuffie," Roxas had said, staring intently into the depths of his lemonade. It was nicer than Aerith's lemonade, and much less likely to cause food poisoning – something to be thankful for. Small hopes, idle thoughts. What's left to be truly thankful for when the heartless have killed so many and taken so much away? One glass of lemonade didn't seem like a worthy compensation at all.

"Hmn?" replied the self-proclaimed ninja, pushing strawberries across her plate. The atmosphere was reminiscent of her long-ago tea parties with Squall where he would shift uneasily in his chair, feeling a fool trying to drink from an empty cup and eat from an empty plate. Yuffie had always been better at things like that, the things everybody else found awkward.

"You know this can't work out… Like, ever, right?" he asked in a deadpan voice, not caring if he stamped out all her fantasies there and then. The world wasn't good and nice and sprinkled with sugar, it was dark and cold and people died and it was time she realised that and got out her dreamland.

"I know," Yuffie replied, rolling her eyes in a way that said she'd heard it all before fifty times over and was thoroughly bored of the subject. "You have no heart. You have no feelings. You're a nobody. I got it."

"So if you get it why do you keep on being so damn persistent? You'll just get hurt," Roxas frowned, attempting to work out 'humans' and their daft mental processes. Maybe it was better not having emotions than floundering around feeling about fifty different things at once. Nothing would get done that way, worlds would – already had – gone to ruin. Hmph. Small wonder.

"I don't know," Yuffie shrugged, eyes to her cheesecake. "I guess… Well…" And then it clicked, something sliding into place – her eyes widened, her mouth curled into a smile. "I've always loved playing pretend and…"

"And?"

"You're the only person who's ever joined in."

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a.n: i was gonna write akuroku, i really was D: but then i got this idea instead, one of those cliché, over-used ideas that are still really cool and cry to be written down. so yeh. enjoy.