Disclaimer: I do not own Yuffie and Godo Kisaragi, Vincent Valentine, AVALANCHE, all characters and concepts related to AVALANCHE, or, in fact, anything that is from Final Fantasy VII (that honour goes to the wonderful bunch at Square-Enix).

Claimer: I DO, however, own the concept of this story, the name Phe Tsen Shu, the rest of the Shu family, the concept of North Wutai and South Wutai being separate countries, the concept of materia beading, the city of Le Phe Tan, the bastardization of the name Leviathan into Le Phe Tan, the bastardization of Da Chao into Da Cha O, the Lady Cho Lin Chang, and other things not found in FF7. Feel free to use my ideas and original characters, but please give me credit. If you don't give me credit, Tsen Li will turn into a Gary Stu, ruin your story, and then eat your liver.

And When that Day Comes

Dig my head down deep so I can't hear the cars

Outside on the street, and the stars are laughing

They get a kick out of my misery.

I've tried everything short of Aristotle,

Dramamine, and the whiskey bottle,

I pray for the day when my ship comes in

And I can sleep the sleep of the just again

—Insomniac, Straight No Chaser

Chapter Nine

Summer, Year of the Star that Did Not Fall

City of Wutai (formerly Da Cha O) --- Palace

"May I inquire as to the object that so holds your attention, father?"

Yuffie winced at the chill she heard in Tsen Li's voice. She hated her father, but she would never speak to him so coldly. Better to make her reasons for hating him clear, than make the people around him suffer.

"They are just some old photographs, son. I am sure I showed them to you before. They would not interest you." Mao Li responded with the same chill. Yuffie repressed a shudder at the thought of that sort of relationship.

"Oh," Tsen Li said. "Those photographs. Do you take them with you everywhere?"

The derisive note in his voice did nothing to improve her opinion of Tsen Li. How could somebody talk to his father like that? Not having any respect for a man was one thing, but being openly contemptuous and derisive?

Chekhov would have hit her so hard she'd given her a concussion if she'd ever shown open contempt to Godo. Disrespect? Disagreement? Criticism? So long as she showed them in private, all fine. But outright contempt? Definitely not fine, public or private.

"Yes, boy, I do. When you come to be my age, you too, will have something of the dead that you treasure."

"But he's not dead," Tsen Li hissed. "That's why we're here. That's why we're doing this."

"Even if this man really is him, my nephew is long dead."

And then, all of a sudden, it clicked. Every last little piece fell into place in her mind, like the scattered, broken beads of her mother's bangle forming a pattern.

"I understand," Yuffie said. Her voice came out sounding rushed, harried.

Sudden.

"Something of Lady Cho's?"

"You could say that," Yuffie replied.

Her gaze slipped to her left arm, where her mother had worn her bangle.

Late Summer, The Final Year of The War

City of Da Cha O --- Palace

"I can count to a hundred!" Yu Fi says to the dark-haired one.

"Really? I haven't heard you count to much more than thirty."

"Thirty-one-thirty-two-thirty-three-thirty-four..."

"Ah, but can you count in Midgarian?"

"...Fur-dee-wun, fur-dee-too, fur-dee-fwee, fur-dee-for..."

"Zack, you have created a monster." This comes from the tall one with the hair like... like...

She doesn't know what his hair looks like. It's very light, almost white. She has never seen hair like this.

And he has green eyes. They glow a little. Well, they glow a lot. It's weird. She's never seen anybody who looks like him.

The dark haired one gives the green-eyed one a smile, like he's saying sorry. "Oops?"

"...fur-dee-fie, fur-dee-sex, fur-dee-sef-en, fur-dee-hate..."

The dark haired one blinks. "So you can count in Midgarian."

"A little," she says. "Fur-dee-nine, Fif-tee! Fiftee-wun—"

"—You forgot forty."

"Oops?"

The dark haired one (she thinks the light one called him Zack) bends down and hands her a glowing stick.

"What's this?" She asks.

"It's a Mako stick. The kids in Midgar like to play with them."

"What do they use it for? Throwing practice?"

"Well, little Lady, I don't know. I guess that depends on what throwing practice is."

She laughs. "I'll show you." She jumps onto a rug, making an amazingly heavy thud sound for such a small child. And then, in a high-pitched wail that sounds exactly like any injured child she has ever heard, she cries, "GOOOORKY, I SKINNED MY KNEE!"

The man named Gorky comes running. She whips out the Mako stick and throws it.

It hits him in the forehead.

Her mother turns around, from her conversation with the light one. "Gorky, you need to stop falling for that one. Yuffie hasn't skinned her knees since she stopped taking naps. And if she has, she certainly stopped wailing about it when she stopped taking naps."

"My apologies, Lady Cho."

"There is no need to apologise, Gorky. Just stop falling for it."

"Yes, Lady Cho."

Yu Fi looks up at Zack, grinning mischievously. "That's throwing practice."

"I see," says Zack, smiling. "Well, little Lady, why don't you run along now and find somebody else to throw that stick at?"

Yu Fi nods.

Moments later, the stick hits the white-haired one in the back of the head.

"So sorry, General Sephiroth," Lady Cho says. "My daughter—"

"—Is a child. Children are children. They, without malice, throw things at those they fear."

"That was not what I was going to say. I was going to say that my daughter cannot be trusted with any form of throwing weapon in hand. She uses them on everyone. Her father has a bruise on the back of his head."

"...oh."

"Yu Fi?" Mao Li asked.

"Is something wrong?"

"No, nothing's wrong. If you will excuse me..." And with that, she stood. "I have something I need to tend."

"You don't carry it with you everywhere, do you?"

"I haven't been able to. Not yet. I need to get it."

And she left. Her slippers carried her soundlessly from the room. She moved through the halls as if sliding on some dark river, coiling silently. The shadows actually seemed to have a current.

The thought of the current made her think of the Watery Gates, the Gates of Life and Death. The wheel of water that controlled all. And thinking about the Watery Gates made her think of her home's wild, ridiculous legends.

Not all of them were about Leviathan. They had a few ridiculous ones about Da Chao, too. Like that one about the Statue.

And as she walked, no, let the night carry her, the plan began to form in her mind.

Worthy leaders didn't feel pain at the prospect of being sold for their countries, right? If they wanted to run away, then wouldn't be worthy. Right?

The shadow current didn't answer her. She ignored its silence.

So, if she could somehow make herself worthy... Then this wouldn't bother her as much, right? And hell, maybe this wouldn't even have to happen. If she was worthy, she could think of a way out of it.

She stopped for a moment. The shadow current rushed past her, wind blowing bits of the dirt road with it. She firmed her resolve.

She decided.

The current carried her all the way to Chekhov's house. It carried her along the twisting path up Chekhov's front walk, past the high threshold, through the house designed in perfect accordance with Feng Shuei.

Feng Shuei and the Yi Jing... The two things that both North and South Wutai held in common.

"Yuffie?" Chekhov looked startled that Yuffie had entered her home without permission.

Outside of Wutai, they call this breaking and entering.

"I've come for my mother's things," Yuffie told her.

She marvelled at how quiet her voice sounded. She would never have thought herself capable of sounding so... Gentle. Demure. Normal.

"Why do you need them?"

"I'd like to own them before I die, old woman."

"What are you talking about?"

"Sometime within the next three days... I'm going to do something. Something dangerous. No, don't worry, nothing dumber than anything else I've done, but... Dangerous."

"Yuffie, what are you thinking of doing?"

"Not telling. Just... may I have my mother's things?"

"Well, you've turned seventeen. I suppose it's time." Chekhov sighed. "Let me finish my tea, and I'll show you where they are."

"Thank you. This means a lot to me."

And could well save my life, Yuffie thought but did not say.

Yuffie sat and waited for the old woman to finish her tea. Chekhov probably took her time for expressly that reason: to make Yuffie wait. To study her, to see why Yuffie wanted these things. To see if Yuffie was nervous.

Had she been a little younger, she would have offered to join the old woman. But now, she simply sat and waited. It was no longer her place.

Chekhov set her tea bowl on the table. The porcelain made a light clink. "Are you ready?"

Yuffie nodded.

"Is there a specific thing you want?" Chekhov asked as she led her through her house.

"I'd like to see my mother's bangles..."

"She had just the one. You know that was the way of her family."

"But didn't he, didn't I ruin it? I'm sure he— I— did. So she must have had another."

Chekhov threw back her head and laughed. She laughed and laughed, until Yuffie had to help her stay standing up. Yuffie didn't ask what the old woman thought was so funny.

It wasn't her place, anymore.

And then they arrived in the tiny room. Yuffie looked closely at it, but could glean only the vague impression of a room ruled by shadow currents. In one corner sat a chest of drawers and she thought she could see a pallet in the other corner.

Chekhov went over to the chest of drawers. "Yuffie, cast Fire1 on the candles, hm?"

"I'm not wearing my All materia."

"Then cast it on the individual candles."

Yuffie, grumbling at how long this was going to take, obeyed. Not that it took half as long as she'd thought it would. There weren't very many candles.

Yellow paper on the walls, green woven rugs from South Wutai on the floor. Shurikens, large and small, hung everywhere— suspended from frames that hung from the ceiling, like sun-catchers or the mobiles you hung over baby's cribs.

She began to recognize the room.

"I'm afraid you've been living a bit of a lie, Yuffie. You never moved into your mother's house. You moved into my house." Chekhov sighed. "If you like, I'll move out just as soon as I can. If you're going to claim her bangle, you might as well claim her property."

"That won't be necessary. For now." If I survive, though, I'm kicking your ass to the curb.

Chekhov opened one of the drawers. She took out random boxes and set them on the top of the dresser. After going through several boxes, Chekhov seemed to find what she was looking for.

"This is the one, I think." And Chekhov brought the box over to her. Wizened, arthritic hands pressed the box into Yuffie's hands. "This was your mother's, and her mother's before that, and her mother's before that. It goes all the way back to your grandmother's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother's grandmother."

"From mother to daughter to daughter," Yuffie whispered. "Beaded by our own hands, Mastered by our own strength."

"Blessed be Leviathan, who opens the gates of our birth and welcomes us in death."

And Yuffie opened the box, remembering the Fire3 spell that had surely melted the bangle beyond recognition. Though Wutaian materia beading was known to be incredibly hardy, surely a Fire3 spell from Sephiroth would be more than even the most powerful beaded bangle could withstand?

What she found, however, was not a charred and twisted bangle. No remains of her mother's flesh clung to it. It had not blackened, it had not contorted.

Not a single bead had cracked.

Like all materia, the bangle shone. Crafted of dozens, hundreds of tiny materia beads, each little bead catching the light and throwing it back into her face, the bangle shone like a small sun. Hundreds of beads, each and every one of them a full-fledged, Mastered materia.

Of course, the use of such a bracelet as an active offence would require immense power. Yuffie had never heard of any woman in her family managing it.

"How many beads?"

"One hundred and fifteen actual Mastered materia, something like two hundred, at least, non-classifiable materia."

"How did it recover? Is there a Mastered Heal in here somewhere?"

"It didn't have to recover, Yuffie. This bangle absorbs almost all elemental damage."

"But I saw it melt."

"No, you saw your mother fail to call it properly. In her desperation to save you, she made the mistake of ceasing to care about her own life."

Yuffie felt her knees just... Stop. She couldn't lock them anymore. They turned to the same liquid that filled her great-grandmother's coffin. She sank to the floor, wrapped her arms around those liquid knees.

And the tears she had held back for so long came. She didn't cry for only the fact that her mother's death really was her fault. She cried because she hadn't saved Aeris. She cried because Vincent Valentine had lost his family at the age of sixteen, and his father had committed Honour one winter morning some twenty years ago. She cried because Sephiroth had grown up without a mother, and had, in turn, taken her mother from her. She cried for hitting him in the back of the head with a Mako stick because she still had that lingering feeling of maybe if she hadn't done that, her mother would still be alive and she cried because of the way Zack had paled when she'd tried to warn him.

She cried because she didn't know what to wish for. Which part of the world gone to the crapper could she, should she fix? Should she fix her own life, or should she fix Wutai? Did she want to do this at all? Did she deserve to do this?

Would it even work?