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 and all non-canon concepts seen in this chapter and previous chapters. 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 Thirteen
City of Wutai --- The Palace
Yuffie glared down at Tsen Li. She didn't feel sorry in the least. He'd only gotten a taste of what was coming to him. He deserved to be hurt so much more.
The one thing she'd spent almost her whole life working for, the one thing she'd wanted above all others. . .
Gone. Just like that. There was no way AVALANCHE would agree to wear her city's beading, not with Vincent permanently banished, Cloud, Tifa and Cid barred indefinitely from the city of Wutai. . .
She wanted to cry. But she'd already cried enough for the next couple of years.
So instead she steeled herself and tried to think up another plan. Still glaring at Tsen Li.
"Yuffie."
She turned to see her father standing in the shoji doorway.
Her father held out a small, thin bracelet. It only had about sixteen beads, all of them dark green.
She accepted the bracelet, looking closely at the beads and running her thumb over them. The bracelet contained Restore, Ice, Fire, and Thunder.
Four Restore beads. She looked up at Godo, then back down at Tsen Li.
"Why not Chekhov? Or Aunt Kagoko?"
"Neither Chekhov nor Aunt Kagoko broke six ribs, his nose, or came close to rupturing one of his kidneys. You hurt him, Yuffie. Now you heal him."
"Bastard."
"Oh, so now I'm a bastard because I make you take responsibility for your own actions?"
"He doesn't deserve a Cure spell! He's jeopardised Wutai's future with his punishment. How the hell do you think I was planning on transferring our beading to AVALANCHE?"
". . ."
"Yeah!"
Yeah, that's right! Take that, you jerk!
But Godo threw the bracelet at her. She caught it, almost purely out of reflex. Even though materia beads couldn't break, she always found her heart in her throat when people threw the beading around.
Shinra hadn't taken their beading. Their possibility of making more, yes. But what bead strands they'd had, Shinra had never known about.
If any one of those strands had broken, or been destroyed. . . They would have had no way to replace them.
She placed the tip of one finger on each Restore bead. One of the things she'd learned long ago was that the beads wouldn't work unless they were in conjunction with their own kind. You couldn't put separate the beads of a materia and expect them to work— you'd tie your fingers in knots trying, because you had to touch each bead to contact the materia.
Well, unless the strand was at least a hundred years old. The century-old strands were so powerful because the materia became familiar with each other. You tapped the largest bead of one spell and it could contact the others around it, no matter where they were on the strand.
She concentrated. Using four materia at once wasn't what you called a cake walk. It was more like trying to walk barefoot on broken glass with one of your knees out of whack so you couldn't distribute your weight evenly.
"Cure2," she murmured. Four beads flashed once, brightly.
A blue-green glow enveloped Tsen Li's body. His teeth gritted. He whimpered quietly, but those whimpers turned to grunts, moans, and finally, into a scream.
Potions and Hi-Potions hurt so much that the manufacturers included a chemical that temporarily reversed your brain chemistry, causing the brain to incorrectly interpret the nerve stimulation as pleasure, when it was really agony. Magic did no such thing. Doctors refused to use magic in situations such as this one, because the pain overrode almost all anaesthesia. The patient squirmed and thrashed and tended to do more damage to his body than had already been done.
She could hear his ribs grinding back together, the cartilage in his nose popping back into place, the bones that underlay his nose healing.
When the glow receded, Tsen Li opened his eyes and glared at her.
"You attacked me," he snarled.
"Yeah. Yeah, I did."
"Why?"
"Because you've gone and ruined Wutai's future, that's why! I've been trying so hard for six years to get the materia we need for beading, and then. . . And then you had to go and make sure AVALANCHE would get all pissed off and refuse to wear some of our strands!"
"That was technically your fault, Yuffie. If you hadn't put yourself in such a position. . . "
"You bastard," she said through teeth clenched so hard they hurt. "I'm not sorry I kicked you in the shins on the fourteenth anniversary of your uncle's death. I'm not sorry I confused you with your third cousin. I'm not sorry I beat the everliving hell out of you. Don't you dare try to blame this on me! It was all perfectly innocent. Nothing happened, nothing was going to happen. You and Godo just overreacted."
"Of course we did," Tsen Li said. He was looking down his nose at her, and he was lying on a bed!
That stupid, egotistical jerk! How dare he be so condescending! She'd just kicked his ass and handed it back to him, gift wrapped, with a yellow silk ribbon and a get well card.
She wanted to maul him all over again.
So she did the only thing she could.
"Sho Tzu," she snarled. Immediately, a shadow in the corner of the room straightened and came into view.
It turned out that the shadow hadn't been a shadow after all, but a ninja.
"As Second of Da Cha O, I, Kisaragi Yu Fi, declare Heavenly City Da Cha O under martial law. Permit no-one to enter or leave Heaven under any circumstances. Da Chao weeps. Heaven folds unto herself like a lotus flower at night."
"As you wish, Second."
"Sho Tzu!" Her father gasped.
Sho Tzu paused by the door, the tassels of his headband— almost exactly like Yuffie's own, but made of poorer materials— swaying slightly. He bowed extremely low to Godo.
But he said nothing. He emitted one of those tangible silences, the kind that Vincent seemed to ooze.
In Wutai, complete silence was bad. A pause, an 'hm' sound, a sigh. . . You did anything not to be silent. Because silence was a negative, just like "ah" was an affirmative, or at the very least, a sound of understanding.
"Sho Tzu, as Lord of Heaven—"
"My apologies, my Lord, but I swore fealty to your Second, not to you. I have been hers from the time of her mother's death."
Boo-ya, Yuffie thought. I win this round, old man.
"My great-grandfather! My mother. . . You aren't going to let them in? They need to be here, to help plan the wedding!"
Sho Tzu looked sharply at Tsen Li. "My apologies, Lord-to-Be, but you are not of Da Cha O. Were you not of noble birth, I would have to ask you to leave our city."
That shut Tsen Li up right quick. He glared at Yuffie, looking like he wanted to rip her arms off and eat her spine.
Sorry, Tsen. Only AVALANCHE members get to chomp on my backbone.
She watched, pleased, as Sho Tzu, the Jonin of Division Six, left the room to do her bidding.
Yuffie shrugged out of her kimono, slipping instead into a shinobi shozoku. She didn't bother with the scarf or the sleeves. She wore the stereotypical black instead of her preferred dark blue.
She pulled a tekagi onto her right hand, smiling at the way the metal of the handclaws gleamed. Almost like materia, really.
Calmly, she untied her headband and replaced it with one that looked very similar. Materia strands hung from the ends of it, instead of her usual tassels.
The tekagi slipped back into its box. Her mother had been the one to teach her to use it, and she really didn't feel like thinking about her mother at the moment.
She held her tabi in her right hand as she strapped the Conformer to her back and padded from her room, towards the training garden.
She found nobody in it and privately thanked Leviathan.
She untied the strap that held Conformer to her back and hung it on a peg on the garden wall.
She took up a basic defence position, the very basics of Da Chao, and began to flow through her kata. First form into second into third; she moved up through the ranks of Da Chao, all the way up to the final kata.
All Creation. She performed the basic prep moves, but kept the energy inside of her. Instead of unleashing it, unrefined, in a single blast, she used it the way her ancestors had intended her to use it.
As a boost to her physical power. She pushed the massive energy of All Creation into each kick and punch, slowly leaking it, the air glowing as she moved her limbs through it.
Maybe this is what sex feels like, she thought as, liquid-kneed, she sank to the ground for a few moments. Her limbs felt like whipped cream and her stomach was all shaky and every muscle in her body ached.
She recovered quickly. Exhaustion hadn't been the cause of her pain. All Creation tended to leave her weak and shaky, no matter how she used it. Chekhov had told her she would outgrow it as she used it more often and more effectively, but Yuffie wanted to reserve it as a technique of last resort.
"That was some serious speed."
She rose to her feet and whirled to face Tsen Li. He was wearing a simple gi. The belt, she noticed, was black with seven white notches.
"Have you ever wondered what South Wutaian martial arts are like?"
She had. But Vincent had more than cured her of that curiosity. After all, why wonder, when you can learn them?
Those mornings when they'd risen early and found a private place to spar and share hand-to-hand techniques were among her cherished memories.
"Yes," she replied.
"Have you ever wondered which is better?"
"I don't think either of them is better than the other. I think it all depends on the martial artist."
He smirked. "Why don't we test that theory?"
Oh, this was gonna be good. A seventh-degree blackbelt in what was probably a non-sneaky form of martial arts, up against a true Da Chao master.
Da Chao, that hodgepodge of various ninjutsu techniques, didn't measure skill in belts. You were a ninja, or you weren't. After you were a ninja, you went on to become a Da Chao master. And that was that.
"What school do you follow?" She asked. This was going to be funny.
She'd make it be funny, if she had to.
Tsen Li grinned, a grin so wolfish it would tie with Reno's Predatory Grin (TM) in a professional contest. "Mi Tzu, of course."
Mi Tzu. . . A variant of Mizu? And Vincent said he'd studied Mi Tsu. . .
Oh Gawd, this was gonna be good.
"You're on," she said, flashing a predatory grin of her own. "Winner gets to race to the top of Da Chao wearing normal clothing. Loser gets to wear the winner's ugliest kimono."
"Done."
And with that, he launched himself at her. Yuffie laughed, leaping high into the air, backflipping at the height of her jump, sending her into the wall. She managed to backflip from the wall to the top of the wall, and then she dove towards him.
She landed on her hands, performed a handspring, and hit him with a roundhouse kick the instant she was back on her feet.
Another jab with her foot, and then she was driving her fists into his stomach.
He managed to block several of her punches, but when he tried to turn them against her, she slipped out of his grasp and rammed her shoulder into his ribs. He went flying backwards.
He used his momentum to somersault while she moved towards him. He swung out with his left fist. She dodged, but it had been a feint. He landed his first punch to her stomach.
Yuffie dropped all pretences at being an honourable fighter. She began to move even faster than she had before, ducking around him with odd little waltz-steps, never once actually attacking him.
And then she rolled between his legs, kicked his left knee out from under him when she regained her feet, and pulled his neck into a death hold.
The position reminded her of that time Cloud had helped her improve her neck-breaking technique. Not that Yuffie's way hadn't worked, but it had definitely needed improvement.
And Vincent, standing to the side, had suggested twisting her passive arm this way, instead of that way, and not trying to jerk down. And then he'd said to do this thing with two fingers of her active arm.
Made for a cleaner, faster break, he'd said.
He'd been right. Yuffie had tried it on a thug who'd tried to beat her up, and the technique had worked like a charm. She'd never gone back to the technique her father had taught her.
"I yield," Tsen Li hissed.
Yuffie grinned. "I thought you would. Why don't we get you changed?"
". . . You were being serious?"
"Don't pull that with me!"
"Yuffie, height difference?"
"Oh. . . yeah. Okay. You can wear one of the outer layers of my yellow formal kimono over a hakama. How's that?"
He sighed. "Fine."
"Good! Cos if you objected to the yellow, you could always wear the pink."
"Not. Happening."
"Thought so."