Big thanks again to thegreathippothief for the review. I am pleased to have inspired such an interesting analogy.
Cyclamen
The town air smelled so fresh that Yuffie almost forgot that it was air and not some super delicious lemon popsicle covered in blueberries and chocolate and all of the good things she remembered from when she was living the life of a rich girl. Not that, you know, she missed it or anything. Because Yuffie Kisaragi did not miss. If she did, she would totally rectify the situation, like three months, seven days, two-point-five hours ago so there.
She just had to find the hospital and ignore the grating sandy feeling under her shoes that she had grown unused to. For a moment, she wished for rain season because she liked the mud squelching between her toes and it would go just right with the sweet wet smell of fresh air. The lane made her feel small, so she took longer strides just to mess with it.
Stupid lane.
Kisaragi rushed passed each sign barely registering the colors or the words. Every once in a while, she felt a stuffy creeping sensation in the recess of her skull and had to look at the bright yellow Sun. It always twinkled back at her reassuring, as if to say "I got your back Yuffie-licious."
She would nod and wave thanks before she kept going. Had to acknowledge the fans and all that.
Glazing over the boring boring buildings, Yuffie almost missed the square door that led to the hospital in Rocket Town. With amazing reflexes born of natural talent and unmatched dedication, Yuffie skid to a halt and slunk through the door on a back swing from the forward door push.
And this time, she had no reason not to restrain the victory dance.
The nurse stared at her stupidly but she ignored him. He just did not know sex incarnate when he saw it.
Having defeated the door, she blustered merrily forward before she remembered that she had no clear idea where to find the man to whom she wanted to apologize. He was, she assumed, in a room. With a back brace of some kind. But what were front desks for?
After a brief tryst—okay, so it wasn't a tryst, but that receptionist was totally into Yuffie; she just didn't know it—with the front desk clerk, Yuffie came away with scraps from a hole punch in her hair and the room number 307B on her palm.
Up the elevator and three doors down the left most hallway, Yuffie collided with the door in question. Taking a deep breath and double-triple checking that the crazy was nowhere to be found, Yuffie turned the doorknob and snuck—well, she stumbled about around the corner—through the self-made crack.
Yuffie looked around and noticed that there was a man laying on a green-sheeted bed with beedy black eyes and a body cast from the waist down. The creases around his eyes were curled out. He appeared to be from Wutai.
Which made it worse because his princess had knocked a bookshelf on his back. She winced.
The man's hands fisted the sheets. It looked to Yuffie like he tried to scurry back away from her, but the cast did not want to cooperate.
"I came to apologize for freaking out," she said rubbing her fingers behind her neck. She wasn't very good at this. "It was sort of uncalled for."
He just kept looking at her, pulling his hands onto his lap so that he could better hold them up if she would lunge at him.
Yuffie felt a little peeved. She had just apologized after all. What gave him the right to blow her off? Weren't people supposed to, you know, accept apologies? "Hey Mister—"
But when she took a foot-long step forward, he flinched. His tight eyes fluttered in his face.
With a heavy sigh, Yuffie flopped down on the white tile floor and glared at the iron bed leg. The air relaxed a little. She did not need to look up to know that he had released his shoulders enough to peer down at her.
Not that she could blame him. She was pretty magnetic where the eyes were concerned. Still, she felt something like scissors against thin tinsel in the small of her back, and her agitation would not let up no matter how hard she focused on making it disappear.
The bedded man must have taken her moment of dejection as a sign of weakness—which was dumb of course; Yuffie never showed weakness—because he whistled softly and started to speak.
"It's alright Lady Kisaragi," he mumbled grudgingly. "I—no harm done."
Yuffie twisted into herself. Her head dropped between her long legs to the floor. She felt it cool and thrumming against her forehead until she had to squeeze her eyes as tight to hold back the water.
Just for a moment. She released the tension in her back and raised herself steadily up again. She asked him, "You ever been crazy?"
And he said "Not that I know of Lady."
To which she replied "I didn't know for a really long time."
Yuffie could not see him on the bed, but she could hear him fidgeting with the sheets in an effort to quell his discomfort. It wasn't every day that a man tried to scrape the heir to the throne of his country and would-be murderer off the floor while maintaining the relatively safe, yet unyielding vantage point of a hospital bed.
Oh. And the part about being stuck in the body cast had to put a damper on things too.
She would give him points for that, but Yuffie was not in a point-giving mood. She doubted that the dingy smell of rotting carrots stuffed under the mattress helped.
"How did you find out then?" He utterly failed to hide the lack of curiosity in his voice.
She gave it to him. She was generous like that in her state of uncharacteristic dejection. "Vincent told me the day after—you know—yeah that." She felt her struggling smile wilt again.
"Oh. He's helped you a lot then?"
"Yeah," she grumbled, raising her face just enough to see his arm dangling over the side of the bed. "Except that the stupid jerk face picked up and left a week ago."
"I'm—I'm sorry to hear that." And he totally wasn't. Sometimes, being royalty sucked. Sometimes, your subjects had to dust off your rump when you were down. She had mixed feelings on the matter.
"Mmf," she grunted, not willing to call him out and shatter the fake feeling of forgiveness. Everything felt so fluffy and plastic mattress cozy because of it. "He's an idiot anyway. Can't figure out why I even like him."
"Is he a prospective suitor, Lady?" asked the bed-ridden man, feigning interest in politics.
"No," she snorted, pulling her hair back with a sticky left hand. "I like him too much."
"Oh, I see," the man said unhelpfully.
"You don't actually." She laughed. "But that's okay. Not everyone's as brilliant as I am, so don't be too hard on yourself."
Except that her voice sounded less vibrant than it usually did. He tactfully ignored it.
"I suppose not," he admitted.
Yuffie Kisaragi stared thoughtfully at her toes bunched against the flat of her sandals. "Do you think mad girls can fall in love?" she asked him, trying to mask how much the question meant to her.
"I don't know, Lady Kisaragi," the man said tiredly. "As I've already claimed, I don't know what it feels like to be mad, and I've certainly never been a girl. I can't answer that question for you."
The way he said it—like condemnation decorated with disgust—sent Yuffie bolting to stand. She fisted her sides and shot black darts at the man's now-relaxed body on the bed.
"Well you've got an imagination haven't you?" she glowered. "Use it then! Just because I dropped a book case on you—you have no right to ignore your duties to your country! If your Lady asks you a damn question, she expects the best answer you can give her."
"You know," and he crossed his arms over his chest. "I don't much care about the bookcase as my cousin—the one you tried to strangle—anyway. But you're right; you're still my Lady. I think you can fall in love all you want, but I also think it would be irresponsible in your condition. I think you should get help from a doctor. I think a lot of things, but I don't say them because you're the Lady, and you're supposed to know these things."
"But I don't," she snapped. "Is that such a crime?"
"Yes," the man rolled his eyes, "yes it is."
With a gust that truly reeked of awesome, Yuffie twirled on one foot for her dramatic exit toward the door. What did he know anyway? He was stuck in a room with his feet tied up. Responsibility is a big talk when he doesn't have any.
"Lady Kisaragi," he started when her hand was on the door. "I'd like to help you."
"I got help, thanks," she snarled. Yet she could not ignore the tiny voice in her head that cackled at her and told her she was delusional. She was on her own and stuffing the last ounce of help offered to her under the sallow green sheets of the hospital bed just because it was not him offering to help her.
Just as she had decided to turn back around and ask him how a crippled man in a hospital bed could possibly help her—beg if she had to, not like anyone was looking or anything—the knob turned under her fingers.
The door opened toward her. She had to skitter back a bit, but she still saw the face.
Tiny black eyes, flat slanted nose, a lip that curved in an awkward waving line.
That face, covered in the same shock, dripping with tomato seeds. Only they weren't tomato seeds. It was the red on her hands. The red on the door. The red on the walls, her legs, her body on the opposite side of the room from her legs, the toes sprinkling the ground like wet stones…
So uncertain. So afraid. All four of them.
-
Moments later, when Yuffie Kisaragi had left the hospital room, the man in the cast sat huddled on the bed, and felt utterly helpless. The body of his cousin, Jito Sven, slumped against the wall, leaving red streaks after it.
The man on the bed remembered disowning the family with his cousin Jito because they hated the violence, and he hated his cousin Kage Sven.
But the violence had followed them, and Kage Sven's brother—whose face looked so like his younger sibling's—lay dripping on white tile floor around steel bed legs.
When, the man wondered, was the last time he lived in the normal? And why—why—had he lied when he had claimed that he did not understand what it meant to feel mad?
-
The door of Cid Highwind's front door opened for Vincent as if it were welcoming a lost child. The familiar creak of the wood floor made him forget Wutai, made him forget Xie Kisaragi, made him forget Leona Florette, because just then he was in Rocket Town, and just then he wanted very badly to see Yuffie Kisaragi.
Yet when he rounded the corner he found Reeve Tuetsi sitting alone at Shera's floor table, staring at the cup of coffee cradled in his hands.
"Reeve—"
Vincent's stern interruption caused Reeve to jerk his hands and toss the contents of his coffee mug onto his previously immaculate blue suit. "Damnit Vincent," Reeve hissed as if pained, though Vincent doubted the coffee had been hot, "ever considered walking a little louder for the lowly less-enhanced?"
Tuetsi fiddled with a ratty stained kerchief and refused to look up.
Only Vincent did not have the patience to skirt the issue today. "Reeve, what is everyone doing here?"
"It seems that Yuffie had an accident after you left." The commissioner grimaced one last time at his soiled suit before raising his eyes. "She left the house and went to the hospital. Cid found her on the street after—covered in someone else's blood."
Vincent heard the steady condemnation drifting on Reeve's voice like beads of oil. He thought little of it. The red sheets wafting through his mind had a much more palpable effect.
"His name was Jitto Sven, apparently: the man she tried to strangle before in the bookstore."
Vincent nodded dumbly. Of all the little stupid details, the name he had not wanted to know raked his ear drums with arsenic. His vision grew a little fuzzy, and he started to hate himself again before he remembered Leona Florette standing in front of a jagged staircase in Wutai. She looked regal, and she refused to say sorry.
Not that he would have listened. He did not even accept his own apologies.
Colors in his head would not shift aside to reveal Jitto Sven's face. He did not remember because the man's face had been unremarkable and he had not wanted to remember it at the time; he remembered Yuffie's instead.
"I have to talk to Yuffie," Vincent insisted.
Reeve drew circles in the coffee spill on the table with an empty hand. "You aren't going to get much out of her, Vincent."
The nurse at Ridges had told him the same thing about Yuffie's mother.
"What do you mean by that Tuetsi?"
"I mean that she's still the way Cid found her—a week ago. She eats. She sleeps. But she doesn't seem to get where she is. She recognizes people, but Hell if that means anything. She walks around in a daze, and she's—she's pretty jumpy. Her demeanor switches in seconds. Worse than before."
But the gunman could only think of a long white hallway with the number 137 jutting from the front of a casual side door.
He walked down another hallway—this one wasn't much of a hallway actually, and it had purples and blues swirling on the walls instead of white—with his feet shaking and his fingers bunched so tightly into his palm that he could feel the skin break under his nails.
Reeve Tuetsi of the WRO lunged for his shoulder and asked him a question, but Vincent had foolishly blocked out the words again.
To Hell with Reeve Tuetsi. He had his own questions. Vincent Valentine put his hand on the yellow doorknob and turned his wrist.
-
Mostly, the room looked exactly the way he remembered it. Walls still heaved with fickle bright paint, and the obnoxious orange chair had stood its ground through the catastrophe. Someone less observant than Vincent Valentine would not have noticed the difference immediately.
Round stones coated in blues, yellows, and purples peppered the ground, scattering when he shifted his feet. Yuffie Kisaragi sat with her knees up around he ears in the windowsill next to the bed. She stared at a sky-colored rock in her fist, completely silent.
"Yuffie."
She lifted her chin, and he saw her eyes as blank as the stones. Her mismatched mouth had peeled back to reveal a crooked grin that left his fingers twitching.
"Come to admire my awesome I see," she chided, but the voice was distant and neutral—like the voice that had first said 'Hello' in the basement of Nibleheim Mansion.
Unable to focus on anything but the grin and the distant voice, Vincent waded through the stones and bent to kneel next to the window.
"Yuffie," he repeated.
"That would be my name," she laughed. "Funny, didn't know I was quite so famous yet."
It was obvious that she did not recognize him.
Silence followed. Vincent used his right hand to cup her left kneecap. He expected some reaction—maybe a screech, maybe a pounce, arms flung wide to clasp his neck, a barrage of purple stones—but she acted as if she had not felt the pressure at all.
"Yuffie, I met your mother."
She started humming something—most likely another of her own creations—but this song sounded sad to Vincent's ears. That wasn't saying much of course. He had a feeling that any song would sound sad to him at the moment.
"She's living in a place called Ridges, which is—"
"What color would you like?" Yuffie asked suddenly, squashing his question.
Vincent did not ask a follow-up because he assumed that Yuffie would explain; she always did. But this time she did not. This time, it took a solid five minutes before Vincent realized that she was not going to ask. She was not going to say anything if he did not first.
"Why?" He had to force the word out because it felt so wrong to ask a question like that around Yuffie.
"For your materia," she grumbled exasperated. "Pick a color, and I'll give you one. Sheesh. How dense can you possibly be?" She rolled her eyes and twirled her fingers absently over the blue stone she held.
At first, Vincent thought about saying nothing. He considered picking up with his speech about her mother, but he had a feeling he could not get through to her that way. She would push off all things that tried to make sense; she would mold them into tiny round stones before she painted them neon orange and hid them behind his ears.
Instead, Vincent watched her eyes carefully, darting over the rocks, her mussed fingers cluttered with paint and tried to think hard. Because really, he could not lie to himself. At that point, he was still holding on and not letting go, and if he wanted to make it work, he had to speak her language. Luckily, he had spent years getting to know Yuffie's language, and a lifetime getting to know shapes and colors.
Steadily, Vincent lifted his gauntlet and rested it on her calloused fingers. The cuticles looked frittered away by dirt and worry. He lifted his gaze from them and rested his eyes—though she could not see them behind the veil of his sunglasses—on her face.
"Red," he told her evenly. "I want a red one."
Immediately, she slid from the windowsill and began searching through the shrunken pagoda of stones between them. When she had searched for fifteen seconds and found nothing, she began digging frantically. Her knuckles rubbed pink against the rock, and she bit her lower lip so hard that Vincent could see a black ring forming where teeth met flesh.
Eventually, her shoulders sagged, and she pulled up a yellow stone to offer to him.
Vincent remained firm. "That isn't red Yuffie."
She scowled at him, dropped the stone, and lifted the nearest purple one. When he responded similarly, her face dissolved a little. Yet she managed to maintain her quaking grin and replaced the purple rock with blue.
When he shook his head next, he had to sit still and watch the structured barrier break around her, as if the colored rocks were made of glass instead of stone.
It all unraveled. The resolve came loose in his chest and shattered like Shera's fine china on the ground in front of him.
-
Walls breathe the red mist and she can't get it out-out-out of her head. It sits and tears and snares until there's nothing left but the limbs-limbs-limbs and he is broken on the floor but she keeps tearing-tearing-tearing until he—with his beedy eyes and curled bruised lips—looks just like the girl.
In three pieces.
Her mouth, her jaw, her toes, her fingers—
More than three pieces.
So she breaks-breaks-breaks-breaks…
There is the hack and thunk like teeth in brittle white bone and the pieces are everywhere and so small that she forgets—what size, what size, what size are they supposed to be?
And it doesn't stop. It never stops. It's in her head and it won't get out because the walls are still breathing the red mist from the brown and green forest, and she just wants it all to go away.
But the screams won't come back because the girl is in so many pieces that she lost count and when did that lip turn from lush and pouty to torn and gnarled like a sawed off artichoke heart only red-red-red-red—the mist from the walls?
And it's on her shuriken like grease on propeller and why—why—did he have to kill her? Why did he have to kill her? Why did he have to kill the body on the floor the girl standing with the shuriken the mist on the walls the artichoke on the ground the pieces the toesthefloorthehairhisbloodonherstomachandoilinherhead—
And she is crying on the ground with the blood and the dirt all over her khaki shorts, and she wonders when the world got so upside down.
She looks out the window. She sees the yellow Sun turning green.
And the walls? They're still breathing.
-
The first thing she did was chuck the blue stone at Vincent's forehead. He failed to catch it, but she had not been sitting very far away, and so it did not hurt much. The second thing she did was throw her arms around his neck. She squeezed him hard, but he could still breathe, and so he did not notice. The third thing she did was scream and sob all down the front of his shirt. The fabric would fade, he knew, but it was an old shirt, and so he did not mind.
Vincent wrapped his right arm tight around her waist and felt her shake as the invisible fishwire that held her to him stretched and snapped. He rested his face on the top of her head and breathed in the smell of girl and chamomile shampoo. He tried not to think about letting her go again because he knew he would have to, and that was enough.
He was empty of everything but regret. Yuffie Kisaragi did not know how to regret; all she could do was push until there was nothing but stones and beads covering the red.
But he could take all of it, he realized, feeling her elbows scratch his chest. He wished she would throw more rocks. He wished she would throw more china. He wished she would hit, scratch, bite, kick him. He wished she would scream in his ears until they rang.
Maybe then he could go back to blaming himself for all of it.
Everything had been so simple when he could blame himself. If he could blame himself, he could think of separation as a form of punishment. He could muster the resolve to atone for this and leave her in the hands of Reeve's doctors.
But he just couldn't. Not anymore.
Wutai had not been Leona's responsibility. Yuffie was not his. He had not found anything to help Yuffie in her home city—maybe he could tell doctors where to get files on family history, but that was not of major consequence. Instead, he had found help for himself, and he wished that he had not after all.
So when she screamed and sobbed and clawed at him until she fell asleep, Vincent Valentine hoped bitterly that she would wake up for just a second and tell him it was going to be okay.
She wouldn't.
He was bad for her this way; she was bad for him. He had to let go, but it was like the end of the world for the fourth time, only worse because the bad guy was gone, and everything still crumbled.
The door creaked louder, he thought, than Yuffie's wails. He felt her grow rigid, clinging to him, before she pulled away and climbed onto her bed to stare at the ceiling.
"Vincent?" Reeve. Damn Reeve straight the Hell if he had not already.
"Hn."
If Reeve found the scene unusual, he said nothing. The Comissioner stumbled on the colored stones toward the windowsill where he stopped to loom—for once in his life—over Vincent Valentine.
"What did you find in Wutai?" he asked.
"If I haven't told Yuffie, I'm not going to tell you," he answered, agitated.
"You'll have to tell someone." Vincent told himself that the smug tone in Reeve's voice was just his imagination.
"Maybe," but this time Vincent knew he was just saying it to be contrary.
"Vincent, Yuffie has to go to Edge. Jito Sven's cousin agreed he would not press charges or reveal Yuffie's identity if I promised to hospitalize her. It was very kind of him, considering."
Vincent remembered thinking that the two uninspiring men had agreed to the initial terms because of Cid's immortality in Rocket Town. In reality, they only did exactly what he was doing: protect the heir of Wutai.
He watched as Yuffie clambered from the bed onto the drifting ocean of rock. Distractedly, she started stacking the blue ones together in a pile that reminded him of dry salt.
"I know," he said as calmly as he could manage. He felt his temper flaring on the cool skin of his face, but he ignored that too.
"She'll be fine, Vincent," Reeve continued even though Vincent wished he would not, "I promise we'll never leave her alone, and I will not stop getting the best doctors I can find until she's well enough to go home."
"I know," Vincent said again, trying to force a finality into his usually jejune voice.
"You'll be able to visit as much as you want; maybe you can convince Godo to—"
"Reeve," Vincent gasped, trying to collect the ringing empty eyes spilling like marbles in his head, "do you ever think that you talk too much? I get it."
And he did. He watched Yuffie, or not Yuffie, as the case seemed at the moment, stacking rocks on top of each other, separating piles by colors, making smiley faces where there was nothing to smile about, and he did get it.
"Aren't they pretty?" The girl asked in a voice that sounded too distracted, too far away, drifting on the dust and the winds of Wutai.
He watched her thumb the flat of the blue stone that so mirrored her eyes, and shook his head. He remembered the girl in the empty burnt forest. She was full of sorrow then.
"No," he said. "No they aren't." Because when he saw her in Cid Highwind's guest room, she was sitting, holding her sorrow in the rocks and refusing to cry.
-
Before the morning came, fleeting images assailed Vincent. He saw himself holding a thin white hand and running somewhere no one would ever find him. He saw himself taking her to Edge and sitting in her room with her like before, only surrounded by white instead of wood. But the images wafted away like dry ice tendrils, and he could not hold them forever, lest they burn his hand.
He thought of a lot of maybes, and his mind moved fast like Yuffie's did, painting pictures, writing songs, but never telling stories—never writing endings. Eventually, he felt his hair strangling him on the floor in the living room and had to get up.
The empty room took him off guard before he remembered that Cid and Reeve had convinced everyone but himself to go home. Tifa had objected rather violently, but had finally relented under the insistence that a large group would draw attention when they transferred Yuffie.
It did not surprise him that, after only a few moments, Vincent found himself stumbling toward the guest room again. The tiny gap between the door and the wall allowed for a dingy melody to spill into the rest of the house. It sounded garbled and off-key, but Vincent expected as much.
When he approached the door, he peered inside to watch her. He had to stop and check himself because, even after everything, he still could not have predicted what he saw.
The floor was cleared of rocks, save for the back left corner where they had been stacked halfway up the wall. The bed and chair still stood in the center, but the room seemed somehow emptier and lonelier than before. Yuffie Kisaragi busied herself at the wall across from him with her back bowed and her left hand clenched around the handle of a paint can. In her right hand, she held a paint brush two fingers wide with a sprig of deep blue leaking from the tip onto the wall.
Except for that though—except for the shape she drew then—the wall was white. She had paint rolled the whole thing in the night. On the far right corner, he could see a more modest stack: an empty paint can, a roller, and a paint tray piled into a disjointed triangle.
He took a step forward. He saw what Yuffie drew in blue.
The image had the same style as the robot she had drawn on his cheek before he had started taking her into town. The lines were like broken matches, and it was only a stick figure outline, but he could still make it out.
Vincent could not restrain five more steps forward. He stopped only one step behind her and breathed in the scent of lacquer. The image appeared to be a man with two squares coming off of his back and something like a boomerang in one hand. Beside him stood a little girl up to his waist with a triangle for a dress clutching at claw-like twigs coming out of the man's other arm.
"What are you drawing?"
She did not turn around, but he could still hear the distance in her voice. "A man I know—his name is Vincent Valentine. He's kind of a mopester, and really annoying. He doesn't ever get anything right, but he's badass and awesome to talk to. Just don't tell him I said so."
Vincent felt like he had just swallowed Cloud's buster sword.
"I got the colors wrong," she rambled a little more quickly now. "He's got this sweet cape and headband, but I can't remember the right color see? Must be a pretty lame color anyway if I can't remember. I think blue's better."
He did not share his opinion on the matter. "Who's the girl?" he asked instead.
"I think it's me, but Gawd I don't know. Some girl. Annoying like."
"Hn."
"Truth is, I'm scared," she finished. "I know right? Impossible! But I've got this cold clammy nonsense going on, and I keep thinking about when I was real little and the forest burned down outside Wutai. I wanna' grow up some more, even though I think I'm big already. It just felt right to draw the little girl."
Vincent nodded and did not say anything—even though he felt like she painted his face again and not the wall, even though she could not see him nod. He had never heard her so honest about the important things before.
He stood one foot behind her and watched her draw the forest springing up around the stick figures. It looked burnt and minimalistic, and he felt so tired. He only kept himself from crying as a distraction. Otherwise, he could not have prevented himself from taking the paint brush from her fingers.
He wanted to draw himself small too.
-
Chopper blades cleaved the morning sky over Edge. The black vinyl seats made Yuffie Kisaragi stick out like a wax doll. She had been exposed to a bit of fire, but wax could melt and reform. So he told himself that and hoped he was made of wax as well.
"Hey," she said when the ground seemed to get a little closer and the buildings started to look like buildings instead of black pencils. "You look like a man who knows things. Where am I going?"
She had not actually looked at him, just the shroud of her face in the fogged window.
"A place with mirrors," he told her, inspired by the image.
"You coming with me? 'Cause if so, we definitely need to get you a set of facial expressions at the smile store."
"I'm not coming with you," he said.
"Then is that guy?" she asked, waving dismissively at Reeve who sat across from them in the cabin with crossed legs and a fake business smile.
"A little, yes," Reeve answered. "I'll be around."
"Awww," she grumbled. "You just throw me in rooms and lock the door."
Then Vincent felt a hand tighten around his wrist. He looked down and saw her hair clean and straight, her eyes fuzzy, and her lopsided grin sparkling like she had brushed her teeth too many times that morning.
"I'd much rather go with this guy," she beamed. "He doesn't say much, and he always asks the best questions. Almost as good as mine. You know, if I had questions. Which I don't. I just know things like that."
His feet could feel the legs of the helicopter hit the concrete top of Reeve's covert hospital building. When the sound cut above his head, he looked down to see her eyes again. The irises danced behind a veil and he wanted to try, one more time, to look in the box for her. He felt like Wutai: dusty and cracked and full of so many secrets.
"I'll send you updates," Reeve said with a steady voice that sounded a touch uncertain.
Vincent nodded. "Even if they're bad ones," he said to make it very clear that he would not be Godo.
Kisaragi's lips quirked up. Vincent had a sudden insane urge to try to tape her mouth to her chin so that it would not fall off before the next time he saw her. She tugged at him hard and he almost fell down the side stairs on the way out of the helicopter cab.
"You sure you don't want to visit?" Reeve asked sternly. The man folded out the hem of his suit in a vain effort to maintain order. Vincent could see tears glittering in the corners of his eyes.
"It won't help," he told Tuetsi, leaving off the "either of us."
"Maybe," the Commissioner conceded with a less than convinced growl. Reeve followed them out of the hatch.
Yuffie twisted her fingers tight in Vincent's hand. He looked around the roof top at the grey concrete and the yellow beams sticking up in the corners. He felt the air settle around his ears. It smelled nice enough outside, but everything inside pulled and ached. He ignored it.
A man in a black suit opened the arching doorway on the other side of the rooftop: one that tapered off behind into a squat rhombus. He had two other men on his arms. Though they appeared unassuming, Vincent pushed himself to check from behind his sunglasses. Neither of them looked Wutainese. Neither could possibly bear even a vague resemblance to Kage Sven.
The one on the right shuffled a nervous foot forward and came to grab Yuffie's free hand.
"Hey," she complained, sticking a leg out to kick the offender in the shin. "Keep your hands to yourself."
The man doubled over. His companions made to lunge forward and restrain her, but Reeve held up a hand. "That isn't necessary," he said. "She'll come on her own. Won't you Yuffie?"
"If my loyal fans want me." Yet when she smiled, she smiled at Vincent. "Besides, if I get bored, I'll just leave. Like a tree right?" Then she laughed, holding her free hand to her mouth. Vincent felt sure that that made the doctors uncomfortable, but he could not tell; he was looking at Yuffie.
"Okay, so that joke was bad."
Vaguely, Vincent became aware of a small fist slamming hard into the aching part of his back, but it felt like nothing compared to the warm fingers in his hand. Without Yuffie, everything would stop moving.
"But you can at least crack a smile. You know, it won't kill you or anything."
"Hn."
"Come on Yuffie," Reeve said coolly. Vincent noticed him take up his commanding air, and the sick selfish part of him wanted to deck the commissioner.
"Aw jeez, keep your goatee on." She rolled her eyes at Reeve and turned back to face Vincent, still clutching at his right hand. "I bet I know what would help you smile!" she decreed with a fist pump to the air. "I'm sure it gets all dark and sad in there. No wonder you don't smile."
Before Vincent could shake the numbness and understand what she meant, her prying fingers had already jolted to his face and ripped away his sunglasses.
Reeve started. The commissioner tore his hands from his pockets and darted forward. The other men on the roof, startled by Tuetsi's behavior, did the same. Feet skidded on concrete; baritone voices roared. Vincent could not make out the words—
But the uproar flittered away like an ineffectual shout. There was no need.
Yuffie Kisaragi merely stretched her smile wider than her ears and said "You have such lovely red eyes Vincent. I'll miss them."
She tugged at him, and he did not pull back.
When he let go of the fingers clenched in his right hand, he knew that it was the end of the world, and that part of him had died. But still, there was another part of him that was very much alive. Because of that, Vincent Valentine felt something of an ironic smile tug at his flaccid lips. Just like she said it might.
Kisaragi walked away. Her legs wobbled like thin straws as she turned. The dead swish of the chopper started up again.
The end of the world wasn't nearly as bad as he had thought it would be.
We have an epilogue left. It will be short, so hopefully it will be out before the end of the week. Sorry this took so long. I have three versions of each of the last three scenes on my hard drive now. Heh. You'd think I could come up with something better…
Also, let me know if this chapter is as overwhelmingly confusing as it might be. Gah. This story is so far beyond my skill level...