note- italics are for emphasis, brackets are for thought> and italicized brackets> are for big thoughts. Enjoy.
Sometimes, when she just knows no one else is looking, she stops smiling.
Her little face, with its pert mouth and large, stormy grey eyes, will change entirely, as if she had aged in dog years, as if she were older than the rest of them together. Ah, the arrogance of youth gives way to the temperance of early maturity.> Isn't that a line from one of the poems her father made her learn?
She snorts. Early maturity her ass. It has nothing to do with maturity. It's death that makes her old-watching it, running from it, causing it. It's the look on a dragon's scaly face when she cuts the head clean off that makes her old. It's the gargling noise of blood shooting out of a man's mouth when she catches him dead on with a swipe of Conformer. But worst of all, it's the quiet serenity in her mother's eyes-the acceptance of fate, the departure to the lifestream; worst of all, it's watching that body fall backwards, always a woman, always falling> and knowing, the knowing that she can't do anything to stop it.
It's seeing her mother and the Cetra, both stabbed cleanly with that blade-that one that causes wounds so devastating that even magic cannot heal them-it's promising herself that she will not see another falling to that blade, and failing.
It's watching him kill them even in her dreams, whether it be in the fields of Wutai or the shrines of the Ancients.
She always wakes early from those dreams-earlier than the dawn, at that time of night so dark she wonders if the man in the cloak can see through it. She does her best to wake before the Guardian or the completely depressed blonde, the goth in the cape, the woman with the gloves. Because that's how she identifies them now, just people without names, bodies with characteristics. A stuffed mog with a cybernetic cat. A large with a gun for an arm. A foul mouthed pilot that always wears goggles.
When she smiles again, these bodies before her will have names, personalities, purpose. She will care for them and protect them with all of her heart. But for now, they are nothing. They are tools on her way to vengeance, they are stepping stones on her path to salvation. Because at this time of night, when her best-hidden fears, her regrets, her failures have found their way into her mind, she is not a child.
She is a shinobi, and her smile is only a mask.
A/N I always thought the fact that Yuffie is a shinobi is downplayed in fics, you know? it isn't just her mad skillz, it has to be her way of thinking as well. Anyway, that's Yuffie. next chapter: Cloud.