FanFiction is being a biiiitch again! It's gonna make me scream someday!! Like… now. AAAAAAARRRRRRRRUUUUUGGGGGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!! *ahem* I'm finished. Really. No joking.
If you still need a disclaimer, please do us all a favor and exit this site immediately and check into the nearest hospital for mental observation.
And just because I'm doing horrible things to Yuffie doesn't mean I don' like her. I love her to bits, but I'm juss trying to prove a point—that nothing can stop willpower.
~*~
Leon woke with a headache. Understandably so; he had crashed on this unfamiliar place several hours ago and his ship lay in ruins scant yards away. It was a miracle that he had survived. Groaning, he sat up, seeing a handful of the largest Unknowns inspecting his ship. Eyes wide, he watched them and slowly reached for the Gunblade. He wouldn't attack first—he was smarter than that—but he would defend himself if they came after him.
Luckily, they didn't. Satisfied that there was no fresh meat for them to feast on in the ship, they dissolved into gigantic puddles and flowed away, leaving burned ground in their tracks. He watched them leave, seeing, in the distance, a fortress heavily guarded with Unknowns. He would bet his life that that was where Yuffie had been taken. Getting there, however, appeared to be an entirely different challenge all together—and once he got there, how would he know where to start looking? And what was within those forbidding walls? He didn't know. Nor did he care. The only thing on his mind now was Yuffie and her safety.
With the greatest caution, he made his way towards the fortress, not really having a plan as to how to distract the Unknowns long enough to get inside. Or even how to distract them long enough to stop them from devouring him. The dead land nearing the fortress gates was laden with large rocks—he used them to his advantage and dove behind them when he thought that he had been seen.
He looked over one boulder not fifty yards from the gates and watched Unknown pace back and forth, back and forth. They wielded weapons, too. Mostly spears, some arrows, and some javelins, though Leon thought that really all they needed was their unnatural ability to take on the shapes of other creatures. He watched them carefully, trying to see where there may have been a gap between two guards where he could slip through.
No dice—the perimeter of the fortress was full of Unknowns pacing back and forth, never tiring. There was no space between any guards. He watched them carefully, looking harder to see if he had, perhaps, missed a spot. Something caught his eye. One of the Unknowns had slipped out of its' line and into the path of another. They collided with one another and squabbled, thrashing at each other with their spears. Both were skilled, but eventually, they had run each other through with their weapons and dissolved into puddles on the ground, colors still shifting. They left their posts for no longer than a minute before returning. This gave Leon an idea. If they were that stupid, perhaps he could fool them into fighting one another long enough to let him pass and get, if not through the gate, then at least over the wall. The wall was at least fifteen feet high, but it was made of irregularly shaped stones that would serve perfectly as footholds.
So how would he trick them? A shot from his Gunblade would be too obvious, or enrage it enough to come after him. He needed something else—something that wouldn't be so conspicuous… he looked down. All around him there were stones the size of hens eggs. He could throw one far enough to be both safe from being noticed and to be able to see a target. Not having any other plan, or the time in which to think of one, he grabbed up four stones and headed for another boulder, crouching behind it. The Unknowns were still pacing, as if on auto-pilot. Carefully, he took aim and threw one of the stones. It clattered a foot behind one of them. It stopped to look back at it, and continued pacing, having lost interest in it.
Leon scowled and took aim with another stone. This time, it hit one. It hit it low, where its' feet would have been if it had had feet. It stumbled and plowed into the one in front of it. The second one turned and bashed the first on the head with its' spear. The first one gave it a shove, and soon they were fighting like preschool children. They bumped into another, adding a third party to the fight. It just looked like one color-shifting mass rolling randomly across the ground, showing no signs of letting up. Had it been in any other context, it would have been funny. But instead of bursting into peals of hilarity, he got closer to the wall. Closer… closer… closer… he leaped to it and held onto the stones with his hands and tried to get better footing. He succeeded.
The Unknowns beneath him were still fighting, bumping into the wall every so often and making it quake. He feared that he might fall off, but he reached to top alive and sat on the wall, only to be disgruntled to find that more Unknowns were guarding, although not so many as on the outside. The wall would easily have provided him with a good twelve- or thirteen-foot jump, but leaping off of it would probably result in breaking or spraining whatever he landed on, and long experience had showed him that the first thing to hit the ground most of the time was his rear end. He cringed at the thought and looked around for anything that could help him, or else he'd be stuck up here until he died, which, at the rate things were going now, wouldn't be far off.
But a small blessing stood against the wall in a corner opposite him: a tower spiraled to the sky, and it was only four feet away from the wall. There was an arrow loop not too far up, which could have been used for a handhold or a foothold. A perilous balancing act got him from one corner to the other, where the tower stood. Up close, the arrow loop proved to be five feet up. What he was about to do was stupid, and he knew it. But Yuffie was in there, and he could not—would not—let her die. He loved her. More than anyone.
He stood up as straight as he could without losing his balance and stretched his arms out, slipping his hands into the narrow slit in the side of the tower. He let himself drop from the wall, and braced his feet on the side of the tower. It took a great deal of energy to pull himself up; once he was braced as well as he could, he took hold of the top of the arrow loop where a stone stuck out some. There was a window twenty-some-odd feet up that he could fit through it he got up to it. But there was only one more arrow loop, and it was about ten feet above his head. He stood in the current arrow loop, looking up at it. Since the tower was round, a few stone stuck out at the corners, but they would probably not make for good footholds. Fighting the laws of gravity, he slid himself up the tower and into the second arrow loop, and only a few feet above that was a window about two feet across.
He grazed his shoulders climbing into a darkened room. Once all of him had gotten through the window, he fell in a heap on the floor. The floor, like everything else, was stone. He could make out the outlines of some furniture and a huge door, but nothing else. He made his way to that door now, hoping that it wasn't locked, or, if it was, that it was locked from the inside and that there was a key.
Fortunately, the door wasn't even closed all the way. He pushed his way into an ill-lit hallway. The only light came from small, half-moon windows located high up on the walls, out of all reach.
I'm in now… easy part is over. Now I have to find Yuffie, he thought. Oh, God, please let her be all right. He slipped down the hall and towards an archway, not knowing where he was going. This was a big place—it could take a while to figure all of it out. It was worse than Hollow Bastion.
"Hold her still. She keeps thrashing," Discord commanded. Two guards, that weren't Unknowns, but she still had no idea what they were, kept Yuffie immobile. She was pressed against a stone column in a warm room that smelled of burning wood. Her hands were bound in front of her, wrapped around the column. A thick leather strap kept her midsection in one place. When the guard got near her, she swung around and snapped her teeth at him. She almost got him, even though her vision had still not returned to normal. He slammed her head to the stone and held her there.
Someone behind her—from the sound of it, it was Disarray—pulled down the neckline of Clouds' shirt, exposing the back of her shoulder. There was the sound of metal scraping stone; then there was a hiss and the smell of burned material. Discord walked over, and Yuffie felt something hot getting near her skin. Something dangerously hot. She whimpered, trying in vain to get away.
"No use, girl," Disarray said. (They still hadn't learned her real name, so they contented themselves with just calling her "girl.") "The more you squall, the more it will hurt you."
At the word "squall," thoughts of Leon came into her head. Would she ever see him again? Probably not, her mind told her. Tears started to form but she willed them not to fall. No, that can't be right. No…
The heat was getting closer to her—painfully closer. She clenched her eyes shut. Without warning, it plunged onto to back of her shoulder, the part that had been exposed, burning skin and flesh. She shrieked, and the metal disc strapped to her chest began to burn as well. Whenever she screamed or did something that her captors didn't like, the disc reacted by burning her. She snapped her eyes open only to shut them immediately. Her eyes were so sensitive to light, and when she did open them, what she saw was so blurry that everything was indistinguishable.
She gnawed on her lower lip to keep from screaming or crying. The hot object left her skin, but she still burned where it touched. The shirt was pulled back up onto her and she was untied, but a guard still had her by bands around her wrists.
"Now you can't run away from us." Although Yuffie couldn't see Disarrays' face, she knew that the woman wore a nasty smirk. "You should have known better than to let yourself leave with the Unknowns. Now you must stay here until we have seized control of the worlds. That might take a while." To the guards, she said, "Don't take her to her cell. Instead, bring her up to the roof and tie her there. Make sure she faces the sun. Bring her down at dawn and put her in the cellars beneath the jail cells. The sooner she is too sick to go on, the better."
Instead of arguing, Yuffie walked with the guards, too tired and in too much pain to want to fight. She leaned on the wall with one shoulder. There were engravings in the stone wall. She used her arms to feel them. It felt like a mural of some kind, depicting a scene, or a series of scenes. She was only to make out one shape—the shape of a horse. But she would be walked down to the cellars in the morning. She could pick up more of it by then, and from what she knew of these people, she would probably be walked back to the roof the following night. At least she had something to keep her mind occupied: trying to "see" the images in her mind that she felt with her hands, or, in this case, her arms.
The guards shoved her hard up a flight of winding stairs, She tripped and skinned her knees on the stone stairs. One of them opened a door and a blast of cold wind mad her teeth chatter. They shoved her onto the tiles of the roof and tied her to a lightning rod. Wind blew harshly, chilling her to the bone. She could feel the warmth of the sun on her face, but it was rapidly deteriorating as the sun began to set. But once the sun was out, she would be able to open her eyes and possibly find a way out.
It got colder as the sun sank completely below the horizon. Now she was so cold that she could barely feel anything. The roof tiles beneath her legs scratched her up as she tried to shift. After a long time, she gave up and relaxed as much as she could. The ties at her wrists gave. Her shifting so much had caused the ropes to become threadbare on the stones on the tower. She slipped her hands from their restraints and hears the rope fall to the edge of the roof and fall off. It hit the ground a few seconds later—probably about an eighty or one hundred foot drop. She swallowed hard and slowly managed to slide down the side of the tower.
Something smelled funny as she reached the bottom; water sloshed. It was probably a moat, but it wasn't water. Was it? Who knew? All Yuffie cared was that it was her ticket out if she could just get across. With difficulty and daring stupidity, She held her breath and dove into the water. It had a thick, slippery consistency to it—like olive oil. She knifed easily through it, coming up only when she needed air.
Too late, she realized that she had gotten underneath something and she had no way of getting back out for air. She turned back, touching along the large stone slab that was over her, searching for a way out, but she didn't have the time. Tired lungs burned, and she fainted only a few feet from the edge of the stone tunnel where she could have gone up to breathe. The current shoved her to the surface and she floated limply atop the thick substance.
~*~
Oooh, cliffhanger! Don' worry, I don't intend on killing anyone. I'd never do that. Anyway—I'm sorry I didn't get this up yesterday, but I was really tired and I fell asleep at SEVEN PM, woke up again at nine, took a shower, and went back to bed. But I made it up to you, din' I? This was one long chapter! I'll probably make the rest of the chapters half from Leon's POV and half from Yuffie's POV, but I won't be so good at Leon's because I'm not used to writing from a guy's perspective. Authors usually seem to write from the character that's the same sex as them. Leon's a guy, and—guess what—I'm not.
And just out of sheer curiosity, based on my writing, how old do you guys think I am? I juss wanna know. Curiosity killed the cat, but I'm no cat! Vulpes doesn't mean "cat," it means "fox." Vulpes Lapis is Latin for "stone fox." Meaning the animal, not what some girls refer to themselves as. Enough of my blathering. Peeze review, and I'll get chapter five posted ASAP. I pwomise!