Disclaimer: I do not own FFVII. Square does.
Yuffie stared at Tifa, gray eyes slowly darkening to black. Wind murmured through the trees disapprovingly, an angry crowd muttering amongst themselves. "C'mon, Teef, you can't chase him forever."
"I love him," Tifa retorted hotly.
"And you can't have him!" Yuffie snapped back. "He's in love with a dead woman!"
"Like Vincent!"
"I'm not in love with Vincent!" Yuffie turned away in frustration, running one hand through her close-cropped hair. "Vinnie is just someone for me to talk to."
"How is it," Tifa demanded in a low hiss, "that you find talking to an immortal freak easier than talking to the woman who has been an older sister to you almost from the day we met?"
In a whirl of colour Yuffie pressed her shuriken to Tifa's neck. Tifa froze, barely breathing.
"Don't you EVER. Call Vincent that. Again." Yuffie stared straight into Tifa's eyes, and Tifa watched, bewildered, the emotions flashing through them as Yuffie turned away again.
Tifa raised one hand to her jaw unconsciously, staring at the rigid lines of Yuffie's back. "Yuffie...?"
"What."
"Who...are you in love with, then?"
Yuffie gave a strangled half-sob. "You, of all people, should know the answer to that Tifa." She sank against a tree, staring despondently though the forest at the flickering light from the campfire. Cid's raucous laughter drifted towards them. "So you love Cloud. So? Sometimes, that isn't enough. I don't follow the one I love around, because it would upset them. I don't call them every time they're out of sight, because it would annoy them. I don't insist on being with them or knowing where they are all the time, because it would drive them away." When Yuffie turned to look at Tifa, her gray eyes were wet, giving the impression of gray skies pouring rain. "Sometimes, Teef, loving someone means knowing how to leave them alone."
Yuffie turned and began walking back to camp, moving silently even through fallen leaves and twigs. Light glanced off her shuriken, lighting a path to the heavens.
It wasn't until much later that night, after Tifa had painstakingly claimed a spot next to Cloud by brushing rocks and thorny plants away, that it occurred to her just who Yuffie might have been talking about.
And why the ninja had never used the word him.