Here it is: the ending. I hope you enjoyed this fic as much as I enjoyed writing it. Review if it strikes you. Sorry it had to end this way, but without it FFVII couldn't have occurred...

----------------

Vincent Valentine never returned from his vacation. He had, by Hojo's report, never reached Nibelheim. Tseng, new leader of the Turks, lowered his head in sorrow as he met with the President.

"Valentine is dead to us," declared he. "Tseng, from now on you will be in charge of things. I hope that you will prove as capable as he was, and that you will find someone to make his formidable skills once again at our service."

I'm going to have to recruit ten new people if you want someone as competent as he was. 'The perfect Turk,' indeed; he was not only the first, but the best. Tseng lowered his head in respect. "Sure, Mr. President, I'll get right on it."

But first there is one more thing I must do, before I can bury Vincent for good. Rynn needs me now, though she loved him.

She was in his office, crying again. "I should have woken when he left," she said. Still blaming yourself, Rynn?

"You're being too hard on yourself."

"If just to say goodbye...he loved Lucrecia, and I should never have interfered. I was a fool, hoping for something that was already taken. Oh Tseng, he left me ensnared in his grasp as surely as he was in hers, and yet he never even loved me!" She broke down against him. I'm so weak, she thought with disgust. Here I am, acting like a spoiled girl again, and all for what? Because I deluded myself into believing that he and I would start a new life, that he would just walk away from her? But he said in his note...he said he didn't deserve my love. So did he deserve hers?

"Rynn," said Tseng softly. "I'm not Vincent; I know that, and I can never be Vincent." Something in his tone made her look at him, really. Has he loved me this whole time?

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Tell you what?" he asked.

Maybe I'm imagining things, she thought. "Nothing. Just a foolish notion. I'm sorry."

"Here," he said, and pressed play on the recording device. He had prepared for this moment, known it was coming. She jumped as she heard Vincent's voice. It was a conversation between the two of them. "He called me, and I couldn't help but ask."

Ask what, Tseng? Then she listened.

"Do you love her, Vincent?" came the voice loud and clear.

And, right before the phone returned to where it ought to be, she heard one word, frozen in time, preserved in her heart forever. Though soft and hesitant, that one word that justified all her pain and restored her memories of him to the amber happiness of one blessed afternoon: "Yes..."

finis

------------

YAY! It's done! I'll be uploading more stories shortly, I promise.