The last footsteps had quieted when she gestured for Vincent to sit. The gesture was stiff, nervous; most unlike her, especially in such an exhausted state. He sat, to prevent her from craning her neck.
"I don't know how to say this," she said, hands flat against the table, on either side of a slim cardboard folder. "I'm too tired, and it's going to come out wrong, but I can't just keep it to myself, and I don't think I'm going to be able to say it any better no matter how long I wait."
There was no response to make to this pronouncement, but Vincent found his hands hovering over the arms of his chair, pulse and breath climbing steadily. What needed to wait until they were alone?
Something private. Something... personal.
She wouldn't meet his eyes. The moisture in his mouth vanished.
"Yuffie..."
"Just give me a minute," she said, eyes still fixed on the tabletop. Her fingers curled until her hands were fisted loosely against the lacquer, and then she pushed herself upright and looked him square in the face.
"There's some other information here that I thought you'd want to see before the others do. If, if you want them to." She swallowed, and her eyes dropped again. "I'm… not sure what this will mean to you. But it's probably going to come as a bit of a shock."
She slid the folder across the polished table top toward him with both hands, fingertips resting on the corners. He pulled it toward himself, equally formally, and flipped the folder open.
The collection barely even warranted a container: two photographs, some clippings from a faded newspaper, and a worn fabric patch with an embroidered house sigil. Vincent frowned at the clippings, looked up for an explanation, and found Yuffie watching him with an expression he could not name. He brushed the clippings aside and cautiously retrieved the photographs.
The first was a formal portrait; a young man and woman, projecting hesitant joy, fingers entwined to better display the scale and sea shell bracelet worn by the woman. Newly married, Vincent surmised, or about to be. The woman was tall for a Wutaian, and the heavy dressing had not eliminated the wilder tendencies of her hair. The man's features were sharp, though softened by affection, and the bone and ochre of the photograph seemed appropriate for his light, clear eyes.
The second was of considerably lower quality, cut from a broadsheet. He'd have called it a class photograph, except that it appeared to consist of only three students: two young girls and a boy, standing with chests puffed out in front of a gently smiling woman in temple robes.
Despite the changes in her appearance, he recognised the Bahamut-Imbued immediately: the gleam of pride in her eyes, the arrogant curl to her grin.
It took longer to realise he was staring at himself.
"The short clipping goes with the second photo," Yuffie said into his silence. "Three acolytes accepted into the temple for further training. The square clipping commemorates the conclusion of the Shimusou family line after the death of Shimusou Rachin."
She took a deep breath, and Vincent fixed his attention upon the third clipping, as awkwardly shaped as a wooden tile in a child's game. His eye caught the character for fire, latched onto the date, and the varnished table screeched as the gauntlet tensed abruptly against its surface.
"This is about the accident at the festival," he said. Yuffie nodded cautiously.
"There isn't much detail in there, but as far as I can tell, only two acolytes danced the festival that night." She tapped a finger on one corner of the photograph. "One of them was Gorov. She remembers it, but she's certain that she didn't summon that night."
Vincent swallowed against a dry throat, remembering visions he had taken for nightmares. "It was like it was ready. Waiting to be called. I held it for a moment, and then..." And then it had shifted, exploded from his fingertips, and the screaming—
"Chaos did what it does best," Yuffie said, leaning forward as if to grasp his hand. He snatched it out of reach before he could stop himself, remembering fire bursting from his palms and fingertips.
"They gave me to the Shinra, then," he said, low, choked. "Small wonder."
This time, Yuffie did lunge across the table, gripping his fingers as though she could hold him back from the abyss of grief and guilt, the rattling moan of the Gigas.
"They stole you, Vincent," Yuffie said, short, blunt nails carving crescents in his wrist. "They convinced you that it was all for the best when you were too young and too vulnerable to know any better and they took you away before anyone could tell you otherwise." She tightened her grip viciously, until he looked her in the face. "Your mother put herself at death's door trying to find you, and your father refused all dealings with the council and the scientists so vehemently that they were forced out of the village before they could take any more of our children. There is no Shimusou clan any more, Vincent. That's how much you meant to them."
Vincent stared back at her, unable to speak past the ache in his throat. Fury and sorrow swamped him, and no matter how he struggled, he couldn't seem to press the emotions down.
Yuffie's grip loosened, and for a moment he was sure she had seen the struggle in his eyes, the rise of the demons — no, the summons, four faces to a single god — but then he felt her other palm against his, their calluses snagging and rasping against each other.
He gripped her fingers, more tightly than he meant to, and heard the bones grind. But then she squeezed back just as hard, storm grey eyes filmed with tears, and a smile that was nearly a grimace on her face.
"I don't know how you feel about this. I don't know if you know how to feel, right now." She swallowed hard, and her grip gentled. "But I wanted you to have the privacy to work that out. And I wanted to welcome you home, Shimusou Vincent."
He experienced a bizarre double urge, both to bow, and to press her fingertips to his mouth.
"Dryhg oui," he said, the words at once familiar and strange on his tongue, and Yuffie's eyes lit up like a sudden parting of clouds.
"So bmaycina."
[Day 23, 0530 Wutai Standard Time]
The Lady of Wutai woke face down in Nanaki's tufted shoulder, drool slicking the fur beneath her cheek. Eyes half-closed, she stretched slowly and thoroughly, until the steady rise and fall of his ribcage threatened motion sickness.
When she raised her head, Elena rolled her shoulders and made an indistinct morning noise from her post by the window. Yuffie gave an answering mumble as she eased from the mattress, chased by Nanaki's persistent, sleepy rumbling.
By the time she was dressed (six layers, no coat today), the Crescents outside the door had a note. Unrolled, it bore Asako's reed-like signature on the left, and a message about their prisoner on the right.
There is more to learn, for some of you.
Yuffie read the list of names, and frowned. Sephiroth and Vincent, Feather and Aeris, and her. No Cloud. No Nanaki. She walked back to the bed and ruffled his mane gently.
"Apparently Gorov wants to talk. Wanna play fetch?"
Nanaki curled his lip in a mock-snarl, half rolled onto his back and flailed a paw over her shoulder to rebuke her. Then he turned his head so he could focus on the note.
A few hasty splashes at the sink and a deliberately painstaking wardrobe change later, Yuffie led Elena to the reinforced cell that held Gorov. Asako, Feather, and Aeris were already waiting. Reeve hovered beside Feather like an anxious goose.
Elena moved to where she could see them all, arms loose and ready at her sides. Yuffie could still see the tension in her jaw.
Asako wore a simple, sober robe with a thick black overcoat and a sash in a riot of pale spring colours. Yuffie smiled at the nod to imperial mourning, and bowed to Asako as deeply as the old woman had bowed to her. "Interesting names on your list," she said, and Asako quirked her lips.
"Not my list." She tucked her hands into her sleeves, and when she withdrew them, wooden amulets clacked against each other, strung from her fingertips on twists of coloured twine. "These will help your friends. Two for you," she added over Yuffie's shoulder, and dangled a pair of them at Vincent as he and Sephiroth approached. "If you take after your father, you need the extra."
Vincent's eyes darted from Asako to Yuffie, but he took both amulets and secured them to his belt without a word. Sephiroth's lips curved as he dropped one in the pocket of his shirt.
"You must be on guard," Asako advised. "Gorov was wily when she left us, and she has learned much in her absence. Keep your focus strong."
"And if you feel yourself wavering," Yuffie added, "Leave. She isn't going anywhere. Whatever she wants, we don't need to get it all at once."
She gave them a few minutes to prepare, gave Reeve a few minutes more to fuss over Feather and try to weasel his way into the room with them before Elena shut him down and escorted him back to the main house. Sephiroth appeared unworried; Aeris was swinging her amulet around one finger with a distant smile, and after her total lack of reaction to a stabbing, Yuffie supposed she had earned the right to be skeptical of the little block of wood.
Vincent stood on his own, flesh and blood thumb hooked over his belt between the amulets. When she approached, he barely glanced at her.
"Perhaps I should—"
"You'll be fine." She dangled her own amulet at him. "Grandma Asako's amulets are the best in the village."
True, that was because harming someone with said amulets meant you had to deal with Grandma Asako, and Grandma Asako had fourteen tall, strapping, and very obedient grandsons, but there was probably no reason to tell Vincent that.
"Even if you do start to slip, just — try for Gigas, okay?" She winked at his flummoxed expression. "I think he likes me."
With the face he made, she might have been better off telling him about Asako's grandsons.
Elena slammed into the room the Turks shared and kicked Reno's bed frame. "Up. They need you for an interrogation. I wasn't talking to you," she added to Rude, who held up his hands and sat slowly back down. Elena waited until Reno had dragged himself up and out of the room to put a hand over Rude's tumbler and slide it away from him.
She couldn't see his eyes through the sunglasses, but he could damn well see the look on her face when he moved to unscrew the bottle.
"No more of that. We need to talk."
Rude let his hand from the bottle, but she could see him closing down. Before she could think about it too hard, she leaned across the table and grabbed it.
"Hey," she said, nodded at his glasses. She waited. Eventually, Rude sighed and took them off.
His clear brown eyes were bloodshot and exhausted. More than that, he looked resigned. She let go of his hand, but stayed leaning over the table, her face only a foot or so from his.
"Whatever that bitch told you, you have to know that we don't care."
"You have… no idea," Rude said. She could see the tension in his jaw, under the beginnings of stubble. Elena shook her head.
"No. We don't. And you know what? We don't need to. What happened to you, what you did, and whoever you did it to… that's your business, Rude. I don't need to know about it to know that, whatever it is, it's probably not half of what we've done as Turks, together."
He blinked. Elena smiled grimly. This wasn't a direction he'd anticipated.
"None of us are clean, Rude. Not before the Turks, and not after. But I know that whatever we've done to other people, we're not going to do it to each other. We're family."
She was expecting refusal. She was expecting denial.
What she wasn't expecting was for Rude to sputter into laughter, choked and helpless.
"Family," he said, "is what she was talking about. People like me don't deserve family."
"Bullshit," she started, but he cut her off.
"No, Elena. We do need to talk. Family? I killed my family. My foster father wouldn't shut his mouth, so I hit him, and hit him again, and kept on hitting him until he stopped making noise." He spoke bluntly, the words themselves like blows against her flesh. "I did the same to his son when he tried to stop me, and started on his wife. The only reason I'm not rotting in prison is because when Tseng found me, I was hard enough to put down that I'd started sounding like an asset instead of a risk. You have—" and his voice finally cracked, "—no idea what you're talking about."
He started to get up, started to take the bottle with him, and before she could think about it her hand was on his wrist, clawing him back to the table.
"We do need to talk," she parroted, hearing the snarl in her voice. "Because neither do you. You think hitting people causes damage? I ruined people's lives, Rude. I did it to put myself through a better college, not to get my fake-Plate-bourgeois ass out of a bad situation." She felt his arm tense in her hand, and held on to it, eyes stinging as she glared at him. "Tseng didn't find me. I handed myself in when the people whose data I encrypted and sold finally got high-profile enough for their suicides to get reported on the Plate. And you think you're the one who doesn't deserve family? My mom still thinks I won a scholarship!"
Rude's hand, oddly blurred, reached out to rub over her cheek. She blinked, and tears stuck in her lashes.
"We're all no good," she said, mashing at tears with her free hand, trying to see his face. "We're even less good alone."
Two days strapped to a chair had made little difference to the Imbued. Her posture was, perhaps, less defiant, but her limbs remained loose and lax, and her expression had not shifted from arrogant boredom. Feather shrank from the Imbued's yellow gaze as they entered the cell, shoulders hunching as she skulked closer to Sephiroth's back. Were he and the swordsman not of a height, Vincent might have paid more heed to the fleeting urge to follow her example.
"Myto," she said, inclining her head toward Yuffie. "Ruf geht uv oui du yllabd so ehjedydeuh."
"Uin ruhuin du yddaht, I'm sure," Yuffie responded. She shifted her weight onto one hip, trouser pleats rustling, and gestured around the room. "Try a language we all speak, if you have something to say."
"Where shall I find my fun?" The Imbued's gaze flitted over him on its way to Asako, to whom she also inclined her head. "My thanks, grandmother."
"See that I don't regret it," Asako responded, settling down on a crate in the corner of the room. She straightened her spine as much as she was able, and gestured with the top of her carved walking aid. "You had something to say to Yuffie and her friends."
As if this were a schoolyard squabble, Vincent thought, and wondered if she had mediated exactly that between them, a lifetime ago.
But the creature in the chair resembled the dragon inside her more than she did the child in the photograph Yuffie had shown him. Her slitted eyes passed slowly around the room, focusing intently on each face, the inscrutable smirk never leaving her lips.
Her eyes met his for half a heartbeat, and he felt his throat constrict, but whether the amulets worked or there was no attack forthcoming made little difference. Chaos still flared in response to her presence, or his panic, and he spotted the answering alien glimmer from the dragon behind her slit pupils.
"Indeed, I did," she said. She tilted her head slowly to one side. "You see the scales."
To his left, Aeris snorted, and waggled her still-shredded fingertips. "I felt them well enough."
The Imbued's smirk became a thin smile. "They are unintentional," she said. "A flaw in the Imbuing process. Within months, perhaps weeks, I will be dead."
He saw Yuffie's shoulders tense, saw Sephiroth's spine straighten, and then Yuffie said, "What do you mean, a flaw in the process."
"I mean," said Gorov, with exaggerated care, "That the experiment, as performed, was largely unsuccessful. Those few deemed successes have problems of our own."
Vincent thought of Staniv, wheezing through layers of brittle crystal. He thought of the dead, dark materia that had once contained Leviathan, of the driving, freezing rain. "When you die, you will no longer hold the dragon," he realised aloud, and knew by the stillness around him that the thought of an unfettered Bahamut chilled them all.
Sephiroth's head tilted slightly, his braid swaying with the movement. "Shiva was released, and recaptured." He turned, eyes sliding sideways to rest on Feather.
Behind him, Gorov's pupils flared with interest. "So we were right," she said to Feather. "You were a summoner, before this began. But an affinity for the ice goddess will not help you tame a dragon."
"Or a sea serpent," Aeris finished. Her fingers tied knots around each other. "But the lines of the summoners... surely they're too weak, too scattered..."
"So what's your angle?"
The sharpness of Yuffie's tone drew his attention; preservation instinct had him eyeing her stance. Feet planted broadly, hands on hips, chin slightly elevated — somewhere in his mind, the Galian Beast whined.
"After everything you've done, why the hell should we believe—"
"Yuffie."
The Lady of Wutai spun to lock eyes with her small, frail advisor, looking as if she might very soon abandon materia and simply breathe fire. Asako extended her fingers in Gorov's direction, and the Imbued's attempt at a disarming smile became something less professional, more wry. She bowed her head. The muscles in Yuffie's neck bunched, but she turned back to Gorov without comment.
"The work we began, we cannot complete," Gorov said, after a moment. "The Imbuing process takes too long, and remains too fragile. Even the most furious child would not destroy her mother for the sake of an endeavour doomed to fail."
Yuffie exhaled sharply though her nose, but kept any further comments to herself. Gorov's eyes flicked to her, then around the room, before she let their focus slacken to stare at the wall beyond.
"I was trained as a summoner. I know others when I see them, no matter how raw."
Someone else's hackles raised the hair on the back of Vincent's neck.
"When the Imbued perish, the gods we contain will be unleashed. Without trained summoners — without masters — unbalanced by those still sealed in materia. They will destroy this Planet and everything on it, unless I can teach you to seal them again."
Yuffie stomped the corridors as if she were four again, tired and tetchy and forbidden to climb the mountain, or pester the cats, or do whatever it was she'd been intent on. Right now, that thing was finding Vincent, and if she couldn't find him on Kisaragi grounds then she was going out into the streets to find him, promise to Cloud or no. There were more important things, and Vincent keeping secrets that might maybe kill him was one of them.
Where else would he even go? She'd already checked the gardens — they'd run across each other there so often in the last week, it had been the first place she'd looked. But she was running out of options inside the estate, and even with Gorov's apparent change of heart, she doubted Cloud would be happy with her going out of earshot.
She was on the verge of throwing open cupboards to see if he'd taken to hanging like a bat when she realised what she'd been glaring at through the window. The narrow covered walkway outside ran just above the servants garden, and the flowering vine that grew there had been damaged.
She plucked away the crushed leaves and tucked the vines back into place as best she could; they'd take hold again soon enough. A scuff on the bannister made her lips twist upward, and in a few moments she was up on the handrail, twisting to peek back over the edge of the roof.
"Tag," she declared, "you're it," and kicked off the bannister to haul herself onto the roof.
Vincent, sitting with hands loosely clasped over his knees, gave her an owl-eyed expression.
She was up over the edge before he'd thought to extend a hand toward her — a sure sign that she'd startled him out of his thoughts — and it was probably chagrin that made him stay put while she scuttled across the tiles to settle beside him.
Chagrin probably wouldn't get her a pat-down, though.
"Want to talk about it?"
Vincent blinked, and looked back out at the view. Yuffie resisted the urge to shine her pocket light at his cheek to check for scales. "A decision has been made. Until our training begins, there is little to talk about."
"Uh huh," said Yuffie, and the slight drop to his chin said Vincent had caught the sarcasm. "You sure have an interesting definition of 'little'."
His eyes flicked back to her, thoughtful and maybe surprised. That she'd worked it out, or that she'd come to ask about it? Her throat worked on a lump the size of a clenched fist.
"...I wondered, when you told me of my heritage. To have my suspicions confirmed..."
She couldn't breathe. She couldn't—
"...it is difficult to think about."
"Then don't think about it." It was louder than she meant to speak, but Vincent's calm expression didn't change.
"It is a difficult thing to put from one's mind, Yuffie."
"Gods damn you, Vincent Valentine, I was right there with you in that cave." The words burst out all of a piece, a croaky, sticky stream of pain and fury. "Don't you talk to me about— don't you think I know how hard it is— that doesn't mean it isn't going to happen!" Hot tears leaked down her face, spit all salt and slippery like her words were vomit and she had to get them out.
She mashed at the tears with one hand, furious at the tears, furious at him, and when his hand gripped her arm and he said her name she lashed out hard and fast with the other. "Don't Yuffie me is this why you skipped all our beach parties you were made of fucking rocks—"
"Yuffie— Yuffie, stop!"
Her knuckles caught on bronze and leather, and even half-blind with tears, she froze so that his gauntlet wouldn't cut her. His fingertips held fast enough to bruise. And then, instead of her bicep, his good hand found her own.
"Yuffie, I'm not— there's nothing wrong. I meant..." He made a soft sound of frustration, and his fingers tightened. "I am not dying, Yuffie."
She stared at him, eyes stinging, refusing to hope. "B-but you just said—"
"I misunderstood, Yuffie." Again, that gentle pressure on her palm. "I thought... when you told me of my Imbuing, I wondered if Lucrecia could have known. She had access to the files, during the Jenova Project. And there had to be something lost when she died, something missing from the other clones, they were so fragile..."
Yuffie waited as he paused, the faintest crack between his brows as he pulled his thoughts into order. A gloved thumb stroked over the bone of her wrist, and was still.
"Whatever change she made, she included in her serum. The vial that opened me to Chaos. Whatever flaw the rest of the Imbued are subject to, I am free of it. Sephiroth, as well."
The furrow in his brow remained as he examined her face for traces of distress. Gradually his grip on her hand relaxed; the crease between his eyebrows smoothed away.
"I am sorry to have upset you."
Half a breath escaped in a huff of laughter and disbelief. And mucus. Gross. "Yeah, well," she said, trying to discreetly clean her face off with the back of one hand. "Don't tell anyone, but I would be really upset. It would be upsetting, to me."
Vincent made a soft, interrogative sound.
Yuffie floundered.
But only for a second.
"All this time and I never guessed you were made of materia? Can you see Cid's face? Or Barret's? I would never live it down. I would be forced to steal you and keep you here so no one would find out. For the good of Wutai."
"Of course."