n.otes: .to the tune of 'baghdad sky'.
a.dditional notes: Honestly speaking, the answer is no. No, you aren't supposed to be able to make sense of this one. It just sort of... is. Hey, I'm doing 31 days! I'm ALLOWED to write crazyness if I want to!
t.ertiary notes: This was originally written for Vincent's birthday. When asked what he wanted for his "umpteen bajillionth year", he replied, "Yuffie." So, here we go.
Story IV: Sunsets Over Distant Oceans
i.
It is dark, and wet, and tiny pinpricks of sky-colour are striking everywhere.
The sky is exploding.
That is Yuffie's first impression. It is a false one, of course. The sky can't explode. It's just air. But when you consider how much oxygen is up there...
She wonders, briefly, if you could set the whole sky on fire. Like one great big birthday cake or something. Kaboom! Hey, look, everybody, the whole fucking sky is on fire!
"What are you thinking about?" Vincent mumurs. It's probably a scream. But it reaches her as a murmur.
"The sky, and fire, and ooh, Vincent, how long to Mideel?"
"Not long," he shouts.
Not long indeed. Crossing that huge bridge from south of Junon to Mideel doesn't take them long at all. The Black Shadow was the first 100 mile-per-hour tourer, and Vincent is cruising at an easy 95. It's cold, wet and generally miserable. Yuffie, buttoned up in Vincent's trenchcoat and smelling that odd mixture of leather and cinnamon that is Vincent. She is safe, and as warm as she is likely going to get, and the world is cruising by her in silver and red and black.
"LEVIATHAN," she screams, "LIFE IE BEAUTIFUL."
"I'm glad you agree," Vincent screams with her.
ii.
Mideel is an explosion of light and colour and sound and oh god, what a rush, to come off the highway ramp at ninety-eight miles an hour, with a random speedbump. The Black Shadow wheels into a jump. They're not airborne for long, not even twelve seconds, but those four seconds of flight are...
Fucking perfect. Fucking perfect. Oh Leviathan.
She looks at the alien sky, tinged green from the Lifestream. Everyone around her is wearing those stupid white surgical face masks, like they're sick or they're nurses or something. She could laugh. Face masks don't save you from Lifestream. You need a Gast suit for that shit.
Don't they call 'em HASMET suits now? She wonders vaguely, then shakes her head. They say 'Gast suit' in Wutai. That should be good enough for her.
"Come on babe," she sings horsely, "we're gonna paint the town."
Vincent doesn't join her. He likes when she sings showtunes, she can tell from the way he always manages to pull her closer. He never sings along with her, though. That's where he draws one of his lines.
Vincent, she thinks, is a messed-up jumble of planes and angles and lines. His face is all hard, strong lines. His body is a stream of lines, gorgeous and flat and muscled and built and she is drooling at the thought of him, shirtless. His mind and heart and soul and everything that he carries around in his gut--- that's all lines, too. Exploding ones, ones he'll blow your brains out if you cross. His soul is like the lattice work of a playpen. It takes so much work to get past it, to get inside, and once you're in, you're trapped.
She realizes, now, that she loves him. She loves his violence, she loves his lines. She loves every twist and turn in that dark soul with a desperate, consuming love. Sometimes she wishes she could just cup him in her hands and devour him whole, until he was inside her, riding in her stomach, for ever and ever and without end, without parting.
"Telll me you love me, fiend," she screams as they blaze through Mideel, making tracks for god-knows-what and god-knows-why.
His only response is a low, animalistic growl.
Yuffie stares at the rain, the pinpricks of light that look like Mideel and the sky and everything striking her cheeks. She burrows deeper against Vincent's chest.
They race the clouds, not caring about the rain.