Disclaimer: I don't own Final Fantasy VII

Hello all, and Happy Christmas! This is just a little aside for the holiday season - I hope you like it.

Enjoy!

Lantern

It was designed to bring people together. Each clan it's own unique design; each person their own skills showcased for all to see. It was supposed to be a competition, the only one from the area which didn't let any drop of blood fall. Well, except those that fell by accident.

But Vincent thought that it might be the one most beautiful thing on earth that he could still witness.

The lantern festival of Wutai was the one time a year when the very stars in the sky were put to shame. It had started as a competition one year, when the winter had been hard and would only get harder, but the Emperor has wanted to make his subjects' lives a bit easier. Carpenter against carpenter; painter against painter - each clan competing to design the most beautiful array of lanterns to leave to the night sky.

But Vincent didn't know the origins quite like thy at first. Instead, Yuffie had pulled him off the Highwind, away from the safe eyes of those around him, and out into a wild Wutaian night.

She promised it'd be fun.

"C'mon! This is, like, seriously, the best part of the year."

She'd said she wasn't fooling around.

"I'm totally not even kidding!"

And so she pulled him over to one of the highest cliff edges surrounding the Wutai basin, and waited for whatever Yuffie wanted from him to become apparent.

"Oh come on, you've gotta say something."

He sat in utter silence.

"Hey — look!"

And then a giant lantern rose up, not too far from where they were sitting. Beautiful, multifarious colours of paper, with perhaps tens of candles burning inside. And it floated, as though with magic, up, up, and into the heavens...

"Isn't it great?"

Yuffie didn't seem to be speaking to him, for once. And for once, he saw her for who she was: the future Emperor of Wutai, the leader of her people, and but a teen who had taken on the evilest presence in the world and was winning.

She wasn't as beautiful as the lanterns. She wasn't elegant. She wasn't classy, or intelligent.

But she might, he realised, be just what she needed.

They sat together that night, legs dangling over the edge of a cliff, as hundred more lanterns of all kinds of patterns drifted by them. Bright like sheer mako energy lived in them, patterns furling around the paper so intricate his eye could barely take it all in. Dragons and great serpents; waves that flowed with fluid brushstrokes and flames that jagged their way across the night sky. This was a skill he had never quite seen in this way before.

They sat there for hours, just the two of them and the gentle wind and the lanterns floating up above them in the night sky. Then they did it again, the next year. And the year after that.

Some years it snowed, some years the wind was still and silent and the lanterns floated upwards like jellyfish travel the deep seas.

Each year they sat in the same place at the same time, beckoning in the Christmas season in a way only Wutai knew how,

Until one year, when Yuffie was no longer close by his side, keeping him warm. He felt empty, like his left side had floated off like a lantern.

That year, the lanterns were all black, and the lights inside them looked like stars on a great moving ocean.

But Vincent still looked the same.

Years passed. Hundreds. And every year, he still sat in the very same place Yuffie took him all that time ago. Sephiroth was the thing of legends. His children had had so many descendants that none had the blood-red eyes of a Valentine anymore, and his existence had passed into legend as a bizarre disappearance.

But the lanterns still ascended every year. Now more beautiful and awe-inspiring than ever with their electric engineering. Each design a masterpiece of its own; never a competition that surprisingly didn't result in bloodshed. But a tradition that grounded these people, his people, in their history.

And every year, it brought back Yuffie, the sound of her lilting voice, and the excitement of Christmas that the lanterns' lights reflected in her eyes.

"Merry Christmas, Yuffie"

Merry Christmas!

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