This chapter was written while under the influence of Hamasaki Ayumi's song, Dearest. Just so you all know. :D


YUFFIE AND THE BEAST

Chapter 7 in which a birthday party is anticipated and Yuffie gets a little surprise


"Hey Vince," I ask one day, in what should have been a time of quiet contemplation. I tend to set rules and be the one to break them, but I've always had the mentality that rules were made to be broken, even my own.

"Yes Yuffie?"

He looks older now, and has taken an even deeper bent for the taciturn, less and less inclined to speak unless spoken to. I'm not sure if this is the result of his own natural reticence or the effects of his father's – no, Hojo's – experiments, or both. He is extremely thin for his height too, something that I believe is the consequence of growing too fast and too much in too little a space of time.

Oh Leviathan, I pray I'll take him away before the effects of these on him are too permanent to ever be erased. Some nagging feeling in me already tells me that it is too late, but I refuse to cave into despair for it is only in the hope that one day, one day I will take him away, and Vince will be able to smile and laugh and play like the child he really is, despite all that is happening to him now.

He still never speaks about what Hojo does to him when he takes him away, and I never ask. Some horrors are meant to be shared and sorrowed over together, but some horrors will only be made doubly dreadful in the retelling. Every time he is taken away, every time he transforms, and every morning when he regains his human form, something seems to have been lost, wrested from him. Every time, I fancy, if just a little, his eyes are becoming emptier and emptier. The nagging little part of me I try never listen to but usually turns out to be annoyingly correct tells me that what he's losing is his humanity, and one day, the monster Vinny, no matter how cute and blue and fluffy he can be, is slowly eating the human Vinny I know, and one day he'll eat all of Vinny up and there won't be any human Vinny anymore…

As I'm absorbed in the dismay of my thoughts, I realise that a pair of garnet red eyes are fixed patiently on me, waiting for me to speak.

I lift my eyes to his and something must have shown in my face for he places the book that he is reading down and moves towards me, coming close but not touching me.

"What's wrong, Yuffie?" His voice, to an outsider, is calm, but I can hear the slight undertone of worry underlying the words that tells me he is quite concerned.

I sit up a little and pull my face into the best hyper-ninja-girl expression that I can muster. Most people see me in this mode and assume that I'm just high on sugar, not thinking very much at all, and then ignore me as I bluster around. No one tells the hyper ninja the really important things, but they don't bother hiding the other important things from her either – like the locations of their materia pouches for one thing. I've used this guise successfully for so many years (since I became the Great Materia Thief at the tender age of ten) and it hasn't failed me yet. To tell the truth, I've done it so much that sometimes I feel like I really am a restless, overly bubbly ninja girl.

"Nothing Vince! What gave YOU that impression?" My silly grin should be able to drive him off. For some reason it makes him really confused, be it in monster or human form. Ever seen a confused blue beast backing away from you almost shuddering as you turn your maniacal grin at him? You should try it one day. It's actually loads of fun.

He looks rather unconvinced, but stops his questioning, as I hoped. He still gets cowed by me, despite being almost my height now, thanks to his accelerated growth.

"Anyways, what was I gonna say before I spaced out…oh yeah, Vinnie…when's your birthday? I've been here almost a year and I just remembered that my birthday's coming up, and I realised that we've never celebrated yours, so when…" My voice dies up as I see his face, how it is slowly closing up and going into the blank mask that he puts on when he's trying to hide something that he doesn't want to talk about.

"I don't have a birthday," he says curtly, in his final way indicating that the topic has ended.

Okay… I mentally add 'birthday' to the list that I've been compiling of What Not To Say To Vincent, to be added to 'Lucrecia', 'memories of the past', 'what does Hojo do to you' and for some odd reason 'lemon cheesecake'.

I almost back down (note the almost) but my insatiable curiousity gets the better of me and I cannot resist. Is it the mention of his birthday that he objects to or is it birthdays in general?

Feeling that I'm on the brink of solving a great mystery, I prod a little, as delicately as I can, or at least, as delicately as I know how. Which, to be honest, rarely ever borders on subtle.

"We won't talk about your birthday, but do you have any objections discussing mine?" I watch him carefully, and as he relaxes, I do a little victory dance in my head. I amend the word 'birthday' on my list to 'his own birthday' instead. He nods and I take that as a go ahead to blaze full speed forward. "How about this, I want to have a birthday party! I'll get a cake and stuff from the village, we'll decorate the library or something, and we'll have a mini-party! We can even have guests...well, a guest, if Rachael agrees to join in…"

This elicits a ghost of a smile from Vincent as he imagines Rachael 'partying' along with us.

"And we can have streamers, a HUGE pink banner, and those loud poppy things that people always have at parties, and fairy floss and bowls and bowls of candy…" As I speak I wax more and more enthusiastic, even as a small germ of an idea takes root in my mind.

Vincent listens attentively, and even manages to look as if he's interested, even eager. He still is a kid after all, and all kids love parties right? I'm not too sure if I'm overgeneralising here, but work with me.

The party idea consumes my thoughts and is the main topic of our conversations over the next few days. Vincent seems initially mildly interested at best, but I think my exuberance is catching. We spend an entire day decorating the library, having decided that it's the best place for the party, I go out and spend all the gil that Hojo has given me on tooth-decaying sweets, various food of all kinds, streamers, balloons, anything and everything that catches my eye. Since my father has never bothered with anything as trivial as my birthday since my mother's death, I like to think of this seventeenth party as something to make up for all those years I missed out on having a massive celebration.

It is the morning of the party and I awaken with a dark feeling of foreboding. I don't know if I believe in signs and portents. The most beautiful sky I have ever seen was the morning the day my mother… No. My thoughts are going down a track they should not take, one that I have barred myself from entering.

Having done what I need to do, I walk back into the bedroom to wake Vincent up. As I reach out a hand to touch him on his shoulder, I realise that if I go by just how he looks, Vincent is already in his early teens. My fingers hover just a little above his shoulder as I think. I wonder if the day will come...when he will look even older than me? I cannot even conceive it right now, but if things continue at this rate... I give myself a hard shake, driving away those thoughts from my mind.

Because he is one of the lightest sleepers I know, barring myself, his eyes are already open almost as soon as my hand makes contact.

"Good morning Vinnie," I say, smiling down at him, seating myself on the edge of the bed.

"Happy birthday, Yuffie," he responds, with one of his rare smiles, the smile that has become even rarer these recent months, and my heart aches for the boy child I see before me. Something of my emotions must be showing in my face, for his is now filled with concern.

"Yuffie?" He squirms a little until he is sitting upright, on eye level with me. "What's-" his voice cracks a bit, and he clears his throat a few times to try again. "Is everything alright?"

As I hear him speak, another shard pieces my heart. He's only supposed to be a child of about six, or maybe even less. Why is it that I can already hear that his voice is starting to break, he displays a maturity that I would not be ashamed to possess and his intellect is like, or maybe even superior to that of an adult.

Against my will, tears begin to gather in my eyes and leak out at the corners. Furious at myself for crying in front of Vincent, I rub my face against my sleeve wildly, willing them to dry up.

I feel the bed move a little as Vincent leans forward and envelops me, a little slowly and a little awkwardly in a hug, as I have always done whenever he wakes up screaming from the horrors that haunt his dreams. I almost laugh at the role reversal, but then the tears rise in a fresh new flood, because the arms that I can feel around me, though thin and a bit scrawny, are no longer the arms of the child I can remember just a few months ago.

It takes me a few minutes to get my sniffles under control, but finally, I regain my composure and pull away a little from Vince. He releases me, resting both his hands on his lap, but his eyes, as they watch me, are grave. I force out a weak smile, the best that I can muster at the moment.

"It's just…" My mind spins wildly, trying to find an explanation, and I blurt out the first one, without stopping to consider how ridiculous it sounds. "Your hair's gotten so long."

The gamut of expressions on his face is almost amusing to watch, from incredulity, to puzzlement, and finally settling on a small frown, which I can't really read, except that it contains a hint of anger along with the other complicated emotions he seems to be feeling.

"That–" he states drily, reaching out to tug a lock of my hair, not too hard, but firmly enough that I did feel a little pain. "–was a lie." He continues to play with my hair, long fingers tangling through the strands, as I stare, strands of my fringe escaping him and falling on my eyes and cheek, shock rising in me slowly but inexorably. "Yours has grown a lot longer too." With that, he gets out of bed, walking out of the door, without even a glance back at my dumbfounded face.

I reach up my hands to ruffle my hair in an attempt to shed some light on what he just did. "What on earth was that all about?" I ask aloud to the empty room, still staring at the open doorway through which he left.


AN: :) Reviews are loved and welcomed!

Annette Silhouette: Yeap, I made up the flower language xD I was planning on doing more, but we'll have to see how that goes =)

warandchaoshorla: Why not Chaos? Well, there are several reasons, but one of them is because the Chaosform has its own backstory connected to it (think DoC), and I don't want this story to have that complication, which I will think about whether I like to or not if I had used his normal monster forms.

In chapter 8 … will the party go on as planned? Will Yuffie finally leave the house, bringing Vincent with her?