Traveling down the steep mountain was miserable for poor Lightning. Her metal armor stole the warmth from her bones and squeaked angrily with her every movement. The feathered cape on her faulds protected the back of her legs from the wind, but the front of her thighs above the edges of her cuisses were not so lucky. Within minutes, every inch of exposed skin was red and nearly numb. Brittle snow packed itself into every joint of her armor; the chunks closest to her skin melted into uncomfortable and inconsistent rivulets that started to itch when they seeped between her skin and her leathers.

But she was too stubborn to complain. Too proud even to ask her traveling companion to slow his pace. Of course, Vincent realized the problem on his own within the first hour of walking.

"It's heavy, but it will keep you warm," he grunted as he pulled the wool greatcoat from its place atop the rucksack and handed it over with both hands.

The bedraggled young woman pushed back a sweaty hank of her strawberry hair – perhaps 'raspberry' was a better word, thought Vincent, as he noticed her hair was truly pink in direct sunlight – and took the coat without a word. She twisted it around until it sat comfortably around her shoulders, pulled her hair out from under the collar and did up the top three or so buttons to hold it in place so she could keep her hands free.

"Thanks," she said shortly when she finished positioning the coat. Her companion nodded and turned back to the trail, such as it was: the so-called "trail" was a steep alpine game run that no creatures other than dogs, wild chocobos, or mountain cats should have been allowed to travel without climbing equipment. The steadily warming Lightning began picking her way after Vincent's sure-footed steps.

"Where are we going again?" she called after him, though it strained her throat to speak against the wind.

"In a day or two we'll reach the Forgotten Capital," he replied over his shoulder. "If the weather holds. Then it's about as long to Midgar and Edge, but an easy straight shot."

"And from there to where?" Lightning asked.

Vincent balked. He had decided to bring his companion to his friend Tifa, but he had no idea where, if anywhere, he planned to take her afterward.

"I don't know," he admitted.

Lightning squinted at him through the snow-blind. "You have friends in Midgar then," she reasoned.

"Nobody has friends in Midgar. But I have a few in Edge that you would like." Vincent turned back to the trail, but his breakneck pace slowed to a crawl as he regarded the clouds and the scent on the wind. Lightning took the opportunity to draw level with him. She said nothing but fixed her gaze first on the clouds, then on the man. Her head tilted and betrayed her silent inquiry.

"Storm's coming," Vincent explained. Lightning squinted at the innocent-looking clouds.

"How long?" she asked. Her companion took a moment to perform some mental calculation.

"Three hours. Maybe four. Maybe less; it's headed toward us, and we're headed toward it." He paused again. "There's another cave to the south."

"Can we get there before the storm hits?" was Lightning's next logical question. Vincent shook his head.

"Only if you can fly," came his grave answer as he started hiking again. Lightning had to jog to keep up with his long strides, but somehow she managed to stay within three steps of him no matter where he followed the haphazard icy trail.

The storm came on sooner than Vincent had anticipated. They weren't halfway to their cave shelter when the first snowflakes hit. Lightning was just considering how lucky they were that the flakes were dry and powdery rather than wet and heavy when they were abruptly pelted by sharp, raindrop-sized beads of hail. The two huddled together, covering their heads with Lightning's circular shield. Their pace slowed to a crawl as Vincent tried in vain to see their trail through the sheets of hail and the windswept flurries of recent snow.

He gave up trying to see and just concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other as he thought about what to do. There was no visibility, so the safest thing to do in terms of not getting lost would be to hunker down and wait the storm out. But his thoughts turned to Lightning. She wasn't wearing enough layers for the weather in these mountains, he knew immediately. Her platemail was useful against enemies but not at all against temperatures, her leathers were useful where she had them but they did not cover a sufficient percentage of her body, and the greatcoat was open on the bottom, which left her legs especially susceptible to upward wind drafts. Vincent himself could wait the storm out and survive, however uncomfortably, but Lightning would almost certainly catch hypothermia long before the hail let up. That was assuming she didn't have hypothermia now. He had to keep her blood flowing to her extremities, had to keep her moving as long as possible.

He would not fail her. He had known enough of this sort of failure to last two lifetimes.

And so the two plodded on, in a generally downward and southward direction, praying against all logic that Vincent had overestimated the distance to the cave.

"Ho ho! Who's there now?" a voice called out to them across the flurries. Vincent and Lightning stopped in their tracks and peeked their heads out from under the shield.

Before the weary travelers stood the strangest man either of them had yet seen. He was enormously fat and short, to the point that he resembled a grape more than any man at all. That appearance was only accentuated by the fact that he was wearing a deep purple robe that covered his feet and made him look even rounder. His beard was long and white as the snow around him. The old grape-man waved at the pair with a hand that held the shaft a polished wooden shillelagh. His other hand would have waved as well, but since it was busy holding onto the reins of several bridled green chocobos, it only bobbed a little with the rest of his round little body.

Lightning's face contorted in surprise at the sudden appearance of the stranger, but Vincent only breathed a sigh of relief. He knew this eccentric old fellow, a being so ancient as to have forgotten his own name, but to Vincent and his friends he was called the Chocobo Sage. That the Sage happened to be in the area could very well have just saved the travelers' lives. Vincent wasted no time in running to the man and greeting him as heartily as he could manage. The suspicious young woman was much more cautious in her approach, but she eventually drew level with her companion just as he and the bulbous old man were completing their salutations.

"And who is this lovely young lady?" the Chocobo Sage asked in his high-pitched voice as he squinted at Lightning from under the brim of his wide hat. Vincent moved to introduce her.

"This is Lightning," he told the Sage as he indicated the woman with a hand gesture. The motion was exaggerated compared to his normal body language, and Lightning noted that his volume had been louder than normal. Well, she reasoned, this was a very old man. Perhaps his sight and hearing were not so sharp as they had once been.

"Lightning, heh?" repeated the Sage. "Well I'll be, mister Valentine, you certainly found yourself a pretty little wife indeed." The Chocobo Sage cackled, Vincent paled, and Lightning herself blushed and turned her face to the side.

"Sorry to disappoint you, but I'm not his wife," Lightning said after an awkward moment of silence but for the continuing hail around them. The Sage cackled again and tapped his nose with the knob of his shillelagh.

"Engaged then, but it's close enough," he answered with a wink. Vincent shook his head and changed the subject.

"What are you doing out here?" he asked the Sage.

"What was I doing out here, I wonder..." then he noticed the chocobos at his side. "Oh yes, I was walking the birds. But it's about time to go inside, a real bother of a storm we've got ourselves into!" The Sage regarded the freezing couple. "Why don't you both come over for dinner, it would be good to have company again. Goodness knows I can't remember the last time I had a visitor!"

Vincent and Lightning accepted the Sage's offer with as much haste as they could manage with mouths made clumsy and numb by the freezing wind.

The Sage hopped up onto the back of the chocobo nearest him. "Climb aboard, we'll need to ride these fellas to get home!" The travelers readily complied. "And hold on!" he called back as all four of the green chocobos took off, racing so quickly over the snow-packed cliffs and ravines that Lightning was sure she was really flying, though in reality she was uncertain if she was flying or running and she suspected it was a combination of the two. This feeling was quickly supplanted by a question as to how the ill-sighted Chocobo Sage could even see the correct path to take him home. Then again, maybe the chocobos were as anxious to get home and away from the storm as their riders and could tell the way by themselves.

After about twenty minutes during which it seemed the chocobos ran or flew as many miles, the party crested the last ridge and found themselves looking down upon a log cabin in the middle of a calm valley.

"Ho ho! There it is, my friends!" the Chocobo Sage called back to his guests. "Almost home now!" The group took their tired mountain chocobos down this final slope much more slowly, for though the birds were anxious and excited to be home, they were worn out from their swift flight from that terrible hailstorm. As they cleared the snowline and entered the green valley surrounding the cabin, Vincent's tense shoulders visibly loosened and he seemed to breathe easy for the first time since before the storm had hit.

The old Chocobo Sage's little ranch was more full than Vincent had ever seen it. Green and black chocobos dominated the pasture beside the house, but there were a few of other colors. Splashes of blue, pink, and red showed every now and then through the ranks, and a number of yellow chicks chased each other in rampant circles around a well pump. There was not a moment of silence in the yard, between the cheeps of the chicks, the throaty warking of the adults, and always, the incessant scratching of clawed bird feet on the dirt as chocobos of all ages rooted for greens and grubs.

"Ho ho!" the Sage called out as he led the procession into the ranch. All across the pasture, birds raised their heads, tilted them to better see the approaching party, then warked in excitement as they recognized the voice and face of their caretaker. All at once the Sage and his guests were swarmed by chocobo beaks all searching their every pocket and cranny looking for treats of greens.

"Oh here you go you big babies," the Sage admonished fondly as he fished some of the precious greens out of his pockets and threw them to the impatient birds. He turned back and started, visibly bobbing up from his seat, as he seemed to see Vincent and Lightning for the first time.

"Ho ho! Well then, what have we here?" he said all of a sudden. "Vincent Valentine, is that you?"

Vincent and Lightning repeated their introductions. Vincent had almost expected as much at some point or other during their stay, but Lightning was absolutely perplexed. As such, she was no more prepared for the Sage's jokes about her being Vincent's wife the second time around than she was the first. Vincent, being far more prepared for such a thing, offered the rebuttal this time.

"Oh ho, married, engaged, it's all more or less the same with you young people!" the Sage cried before he shot a wink at the 'couple'. "So, honeymooning in the mountains are we? Lovely skiing up here. Nice of you to take a break from all that and visit an old man like me. I can't remember the last time I had visitors..."

Vincent and Lightning exchanged a silent glance. Her eyes spoke a mixture of perplexity and irritation at the continued misconception. The man shrugged his shoulders helplessly and they returned their attention to the Sage, who remained oblivious to the moment and continued prattling about his chocobos. Again he offered them supper, and once again they accepted.

"So tell me, mister Valentine, how ever did you meet this pretty lady?" the Chocobo Sage asked over dinner of stewed greens and chocobo meat. The day had darkened to deep blue twilight in the valley, and the three of them were seated at a rough-hewn wooden table beside a hearth with a well-fed fire. The effect was rustic and cozy and infinitely preferable to the drafty mountain caves.

"Er..." Vincent balked. He was debating the merits of telling the old Sage the truth of finding Lightning in a cave, or making up some other story. Then he remembered that it hardly mattered, as the old man would forget in a few minutes.

"We met in the mountains," Lightning supplied, when Vincent's answer was not forthcoming. The Chocobo Sage's eyes lit up at that.

"Ho ho!" he boomed as well as he could in his feeble old voice. "Up at the Icicle Inn, no doubt! Beautiful country and how romantic!"

Lightning dabbed her face with her napkin and cleared her throat. Vincent just turned his attention back to his stew.

"Oh ho, to be young again," the Chocobo Sage continued, completely oblivious to his guests' silence and discomfort with the topic at hand. "Falling in love on the slopes or by the candlelight at the Inn, or at the winter festival down on the street. The fine dining, the skiing in those sweet mountains, the colorful lanterns in the streets. There's nothing finer than a young couple in love in the snow." He was practically bobbing up and down in his chair with thinking of it all.

Lightning could hardly hold herself steady as she listened to these effusions. In the first place, she was indignant over the Chocobo Sage's pretension, assuming, despite numerous corrections, that she was bound to her traveling companion by anything more than the necessity of survival. It was not that she disliked Vincent, but she could not be certain of her ability to trust him and his dark, mysterious power that she had yet to identify. The idea that she could be married to anyone at all was a thought that caused her no small amount of discomfort, but the added fact that the someone in question was Vincent was practically alarming.

In the second place, the Sage going on about the glories of young love ultimately succeeded only in forcing Lightning to think about her baby sister and the man who would have become her brother-in-law. Despite every fight and disagreement, despite Serah's rebelliousness and Snow's brash, thoughtless actions at every turn, she still loved them both. By the end of the old man's speech, they were the only images in her thoughts. Memories of those two together, through joy and strife, and imaginings of what their wedding ought to have been flooded her mind to the point that she came dangerously close to tears. She held herself in check only by steeling her nerves and channeling her sorrow into annoyance at the Chocobo Sage himself. Somehow she managed to stop herself from snapping at the old man with either words or fists, but the gap between her current level of irritation and her record boiling point was becoming thinner every moment.

Though he kept his head low, Vincent had watched Lightning's face during the Sage's entire speech. He watched as the woman's brow furrowed and her mouth tightened, saw the moisture gather in her big blue eyes. Her knuckles whitened with tension before she removed her hands from the table and set them in her lap as though forcing herself to behave. He could not have known her truest and deepest thoughts, but he was at least observant enough to know her general distress. And so, after the Sage had finished with his excitable little speech, Vincent took it upon himself to change the subject, to inquire after some of his friends who he had expected to be in the area, and if the Sage had chanced to see them.

"Oh, I don't think so," answered the Sage as he leaned back and thought about it. "But then I might have seen them and simply don't remember." Then with a shrug, "Half the time I don't even remember whether or not I've started the stew-pot going for dinner."

Through carefully placed phrases and short questions, Vincent managed to keep the Chocobo Sage's rambling speeches contained to topics that had nothing to do with young couples in the mountains. It was a simple enough task once Vincent found the right trigger: chocobo genetics. The old Sage went on and on about selective chocobo breeding, proper plumage coloring according to the Chocobo Fanciers Association's latest guidelines, how to tell which birds were only good for eating within a day of their hatch. The weary travelers sat back and enjoyed their hot meal and let the Sage go on as long as he wanted. The only trouble with this brilliant plan was that the old man talked so long that his own dinner went cold.