Disclaimer: I do not own "Summer Sunshine", which is by The Corrs, and I don't own Vincent or the field he's walking through. I don't own "Walk On", either. That's by U2.

A/N: The end of chapter six has been bugging me forever, but the chapters I uploaded didn't feel right. Now you have the same old chapter seven, but I'm changing things around a little, here. Thank the gods for The Corrs, because if I'd never heard "Summer Sunshine", this would probably never have come out and you'd be stuck with a stilted ending forever.

Sweet Beginnings

Everyone's changing, I stay the same

I'm a solo cello outside a chorus

I've got a secret, it's time for me to tell it:

You've been keeping me warm.

-- "Summer Sunshine", The Corrs

It was late summer and the wind was in the trees. Vincent was glad for it in the humid Gongaga region, though the strength of the gusts had been playing havoc with his cloak - and his hair - for hours. He stretched out his legs and raised his human hand, considerably more weathered than it had been, to undo the clasps of his cloak.

It had been nearly a year since the Dance of Leviathan, a year spent roaming every square inch of the Planet all over again, on foot, on Chocobo, sometimes working briefly to exterminate the remaining monsters for villages in distress. Vincent didn't give away his time and his ammunition for free - he was not stupid, and though others might think he had all the time in the world with his rather persistent twenty-seventh year, Vincent couldn't help but feel that he had no time left.

Folding his cloak carefully and laying it neatly atop his pack, he paused a moment in thought and then took off his boots as well, wriggling pale toes in the refreshing air and sunlight. He'd bound his hair down his back this morning, but in the wind all the jagged wisps had torn free and were bobbing determinedly around his eyes. He leaned back against the trunk of a convenient tree and squinted up through its branches at the sun that caused this baking heatwave.

He found himself thinking, not for the first time, of her.

Not Lucrecia - no, she had fled his mind many months ago, returning only occasionally to remind him of how much he had loved her when she was alive, no longer to crush his spirits so oppressively as her remembrance had. Instead, his thoughts turned to Yuffie, the whole reason behind his quest.

Never go back to the mansion.

He never had. He'd stepped outside Midgar and just walked, at first just for Wutai, because he longed desperately to follow the ninja into her own world, a world he'd been a part of once and could surely return to. But the thought had paused him - what if he could not? And Yuffie's words rang clear.

I want you to travel the world all over again and find out where you really belong.

His lips curved lazily as he thought of it, and once more he felt her fingertips brush lightly along his cheekbones. Vincent closed his eyes. He'd done as she had requested of him - well, not requested. Yuffie did not request. And Vincent was hardly the type to merely acquiesce. He would charge out in full-blooded passionate fury, or he would not move at all.

Yuffie had somehow roused a much gentler motivation in him.

And he recalled her laughing, dancing and skipping through flames with children the train to her olive kimono. He recalled her desperate anger at him, for him, her hands latched around an immaterial arm (his essence wrapped and rolled in the power of her own) and always the beautiful, sparkling, ever-changing clear grey eyes. Whenever he thought of that time spent in the Lifestream with her, he felt...

(no guilt. no shame.)

...as though there was nothing wrong with spending every remaining second of his existence as close to Yuffie as he had been then.

As close as he had been to her during the Dance of Leviathan. After the Dance of Leviathan.

Vincent's eyes slid towards his cloak, lying neatly folded across his pack. He extended his claw, picked it up by a corner, and then flung it down again some way from where he sat. He smiled in a satisfied sort of way as the cloak lay there, rumpled and uneven on the rocks and the grass, and looking slightly crestfallen at its liberation from folded obscurity.

He picked up his pack again and left it there, walking on for a while in bare feet. It was about time he returned home.

Home - Hard to know what it is if you've never had one

Home - I can't say where it is but I know I'm going

Home - That's where the hurt is

And I know it aches

And your heart it breaks

And you can only take so much

Walk on...

-- "Walk On", U2

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A/N: Next and final chapter coming very soon. Please review.