Disclaimer: Lalala. Not listening to you.
A/N: Bored. Hyper. Studying. Wheee!!! I have no idea when or where weapons are acquired, nor where this is set, so it doesn't really fit in anywhere. ^^ I'd do more research, but I'm not in that section yet, and I can't be bothered. *crazy grin*
Sleeping Ugly
Yuffie stood with her hands on her hips and surveyed the man stretched out on the ground before her. She had strapped her shuriken firmly to her back as soon as the last battle had ended, but then she had turned around to find the guy fast asleep! She peered at him.
"Hey Vinnie, you okay?" She asked him loudly. There was no response. Yuffie snorted. "Well geez, that's hardly a change. You might actually talk more in your sleep, Vinnie Valentine."
She crouched down next to him and picked up the Quicksilver, the gun having fallen from his grasp to lie in the dirt beside him. She picked out the Heal materia that was in one of the materia slots and stared at it for a few seconds. Not even high enough to Heal anything but poison. Man, what a bummer. That was one materia she'd have to leave be when they eventually got to Wutai.
She looked around brightly for a few minutes, cheerily deciding that she might just wait until he woke up. When said few minutes passed, she nudged him with her foot. She'd figured him for a light sleeper, with all those nightmares he was always having, but then again, having slept for, like, a bazillion years, he was probably pretty good at it. Yuffie herself thought that sleep was pretty much a waste of time. She was pretty sure she had forced herself into insomnia.
When he didn't move, she nudged him with her foot again, slightly harder this time. "Hey, monster man, wake up already. Cloud is gonna be soooo annoyed at you if we lose a day. We're supposed to meet him in Rocket Town soon, remember? Like, tomorrow."
No reply. Yuffie sighed and scowled, her lower lip pushing itself out in a comical childish pout. "You're the one who keeps saying that, Vinnie. 'Hurry, Yuffie' and 'Quickly, Yuffie', but who's asleep now, huh?"
A pause.
"Yeah, that's right, buddy, and don't you forget it."
Yuffie stared at his closed eyes for a minute and her face resolved itself slowly into her usual cheerful, inquisitive expression. She sat down beside him and gave the arm above his bronze claw a poke with a skinny Wutaian finger. He didn't so much as frown in his sleep.
"Gawds. With the way you are normally, I'd think you'd have better reflexes than that, Vinnie Valentine."
She brought her spindly legs up to her chest and crossed her arms loosely about them, watching his face with clear grey eyes. She had always thought him kind of scary-looking, even though he didn't scare her in the slightest. It must be the eyes and the harsh colours, she decided with some asperity. Red might suit him, but black washed him out. Made him look like some sort of bloodied ghost. The gold didn't do much for him, either. She flicked the claw with one of her longer nails and got a moment's amusement out of the pinging sound that resulted.
However, that moment's amusement wasn't going to last her the whole afternoon, and Cloud sure wasn't going to be amused if they got to Rocket Town late. She got to her feet and stretched her legs before regarding Vincent with scrutiny. "You sure you're not gonna wake up, Vinnie?" She asked him hopefully, staring at him and willing him to wake up.
He started to snore slightly.
Having laughed a while at this new development, Yuffie eventually tugged him into a sitting position. She hugged him awkwardly to keep him upright while she tried to sit him in a way that she could pick him up. He was a scrawny, bird-boned man so far as she could see. She, Kisaragi Yuffie, should be able to carry him no problems.
She frowned. But she wasn't going to do it like this. Lying him down again carefully, she rolled him over and knotted his cape so that it wouldn't get in her way. Vincent's lax face let his mouth hang open as his face rested between two tussocks of grass in the sandy soil. His slow breath puffed occasional particles of the dirt away from his face. Yuffie grinned. Too bad she didn't have a camera.
She flipped him onto his side as gently as possible and crouched, pulling his claw arm over her shoulders and holding him mostly upright as she stood. That wasn't going to work. Vincent was way too tall. She'd end up dragging his knees in the dirt.
So she took off her shuriken and, bending over like one of Wutai's many old washer-women, flung him over her back, making sure to keep one of his arms behind her neck and dangling over one shoulder as some sort of support. Her knees wobbled at the weight and she let out a gasp of surprise. "Whoa!" She commented in surprise to the unconscious man on her back. "You're pretty damn heavy for a walking corpse."
She walked a few paces experimentally, and hefted him into a more comfortable position. His claw dangled limply and irritatingly at her hip, while his other hand rested just below her collarbone. Hanks of the long, fine black hair were no doubt tangling around the joints of her shoulder armour as the wind easily manipulated the mass of thin strands. She shook her head wonderingly as she started to walk again. Vincent had finer hair than she did. It was uncanny. Maybe it was just because it was longer. Yuffie remembered her mother's hair being gossamer-soft.
Mama had always worn her hair long, but up in a tight wheel on the back of her head. It was only when she let it down at night to brush it that Yuffie got to see it in all its glory, before she bound it into a long, thin plait and kissed her daughter goodnight.
Yuffie had, of course, always snuck outside the shoji doors to sit in the night and watch the stars, sometimes even climbing the twining wooden dragon pillars to sit on the tiled roof and compare her Mama's materia locket to the skies above Wutai.
Needless to say, to a young Yuffie, the materia had looked much prettier than the stars, and far more beautifully majestic than the sand-coloured planes of any of Da Chao's many faces.
Materia had been her goal for much of her life, and she had born her father's request of her to gather materia with pride. It wasn't stealing if it was going to help the country, after all. Everyone else in the world called it tax. She rolled her eyes at herself. She knew it was wrong, but what else could they do to get free of Shinra's reign? She was pretty sure she was doing everything she could, being part of AVALANCHE as well as stealing all the materia that Shinra forced the production of through their mako-thingies.
Come to that, she wasn't at all sure she'd be doing the right thing, stealing from these guys. No matter how much strength they had, they'd need their materia to beat Sephiroth and lay the smack down on the Shinra. And…
She pushed away the twinge of guilt, and focussed with all her might on Vincent's weight on her back as she entered a forest, the most direct Route to Rocket Town. He wasn't about to fall off. He wasn't waking up, either, though. She gave him a suspicious look over her shoulder and hitched him onto a better spot on her back. "How do I know you're not just sleeping to get out of walking to Rocket Town?"
It wasn't something Vincent would do. She doubted he'd ever shirked a chore or feigned illness to get out of school or work for a day. Still, she was getting kind of sick of carrying him. And Cloud's annoyance was starting to look like a breeze compared to the burning in her lower back.
She lowered him carefully to the ground and propped him up against a tree while she stretched her back. She winced as the joints crackled and popped like some weird and morbid excuse for a breakfast cereal, and then stuck her shuriken into the ground next to Vincent.
He looked kind of funny, at an odd angle due to the bulky knot in his cloak. Figuring by his words the first time she had seen him wake up ("Get out.") she decided Vinnie would not be any more of a morning person if he had a humongous crick in his back when the sleep spell finally wore off. Humming to herself, she pulled his knees up and leaned his torso against them while she worked on undoing the mess she had made of his cloak. As a knots expert, it didn't take long. She pushed Vincent back against the tree and smiled fondly as his head tilted to rest in a slight depression in the trunk.
Okay, so maybe she had thought him creepy when they were in the basement of the Shinra Mansion. Out of the dimness, in the dappled golden light of the forest, he was kind of… cute. She almost slapped her forehead at the thought. Vincent? Cute? The two just did not go together. Hell, Galian Beast probably had more of a 'cute' factor than Vincent did. But… still… he was kind of adorable without the death glare, and without the constant tension thrumming along every line of his body. It was as though while he was asleep, every wall he constructed when awake just collapsed and left him this loose marionette, slumped against a tree trunk without a care in the world.
Just looking at him made Yuffie sleepy.
She yawned widely. Well, maybe a nap wouldn't be so bad. She was too tired to carry Vincent much further, anyway. "Shove over, monster man, I wanna share your trunk." She giggled at the foolishness of her words and squeezed into the hollow between his body and the barrier of one of the tree's mighty roots. She tugged his cloak around her and closed her eyes, nestling her head into his chest.
"You drool on my hair, I'm gonna cut out your tongue, Vinnie…" She managed sleepily, and then she was out like a light.
*
It was like coming up for air after being underwater for… for a very long time. Lungs breathed as though for the first time the warmed air of the afternoon, skin was kissed by the balm of the breeze… and a warmth was curled by his side, soft fine hair beneath his cheek, far too soft to be his own.
Vincent's eyes snapped open and his head jerked upright. His blood red eyes darted around in a panic… but he was in a wood. A quiet wood, and beside him, snug against his side, was…
…Yuffie…
Vincent stood up so quickly a bystander would have thought he had been burned. Unfortunately, wrapped in his cloak as she was, Yuffie was tossed on to the ground. She made a soft moaning sound and opened her eyes, pulling her face up out of the dust. She blinked at him sleepily as he stared at her in something approaching horror.
"Oh… you're awake. Welcome back to the land of the living, monster man." She yawned widely and brushed the dirt off her face, seemingly oblivious to the fact that she'd just been thrown in the dirt. In fact, it was about the most cheerful he had ever seen her when she had just awoken…
"…what happened?" Vincent asked, his voice a careful monotone.
"Eh." Yuffie stretched like a cat and got to her feet, yanking on her shuriken to pull it from the ground. "Some monster cast sleep on you and I had to lug you all the way out of that shallow valley near Mt Nibel… oh. Here's your gun." She tugged it and the strap she had attached it to over her head and tossed it to him.
"You need to lose some weight, Vinnie. You're about as light as Midgar."
Vincent stared at her in bewilderment as she tossed her shuriken from hand to hand and then started off to the north.
"Well come on, monster man, we're late thanks to you. Cloud wanted us to be in Rocket Town by tomorrow, and we've still got a loooong way to go. In fact, hey, now it's your turn to carry me!"
Sigh. "We will lose more time if I carry you, Yuffie."
"But you're a big strong monster man, and—" A well-placed death glare shut her up. "Yeah, yeah. Well. Next time, then." She flounced off through the trees. Damn ungrateful vampire monster thing.
~*~
A/N: …I liked the first one better, but tell me what you think. :) Next… Berserk! :D! Please review.
