"Lady Kisragi, you have a package."

The young woman, dressed in the traditional ornate robes of a high-ranking Wutaian Lady, sighed. It was always 'Lady Kisragi' or occasionally 'Lady Yufaline'. No one had called her Yuffie in over a year, it wasn't fitting a woman of her rank. And no one had called her a brat in even longer.

What was she thinking? No one had ever called her a brat, right? Wasn't that how it was supposed to be?

She didn't want it to be that way. According to everyone, Avalanche ceased to exist when the Sector Seven plate fell, with Barett Wallace as the only survivor. They had all agreed that it would be for the best if the world considered Avalanche dead and no one around them knew of what they had done. Officially, she had gone off on a journey of self discovery at the age of fifteen, and had returned soon after Meteor destroyed Midgar. She had never joined a group called Avalanche, had never traveled on the Highwind, had never raised Chocobo's and even raced them at the Gold Saucer, had never stood on the edge of the world and laughed at the devil with her teammates-

What team? They never happened.

According to the records, Meteor was a freak happening of nature, and the Planet had repelled it- without help. Nowhere did it say that Sephiroth had been possessed by Jenova, that he had summoned the massive rock, that Black OR White Materia had existed, that Holy had ever been summoned.

Avalanche had never existed outside of Midgar. They hadn't saved the world. They had never even met.

She knew that if she ever saw any of them again, it'd have to be as if for the first time. She wouldn't be able to meet with Reeve Brannon, leader of Neo-Midgar, or with Nanaki, leader of the Canyon, and laugh and call them Cat and Red, and they wouldn't laugh back and call her Brat. If she traveled via Rocket Shipping and rode on the Highwind itself, the ships Captain wouldn't be Chief to her, but 'Sir' and 'Mr. Highwind'. And if were to meet the Captain's first mate, a stern young man with scarlet eyes, he'd introduce himself as Vitu Fairtai. She'd never met Barett Wallace of Corel, nor Tina and Kyle Stokham of Kalm. Sephiroth was just a memory from her childhood.

The name's Vincent Valentine, Cloud Strife, Tifa Lockheart and Aerith Gainsborough meant nothing to her. Aerith Gainsborough and Tifa Lockheart had died beneath the Sector Seven plate, Cloud Strife had died in Nibelheim when she was eleven, and Vincent Valentine had disappeared decades before her birth. They meant nothing to her.

Nothing.

They meant everything and she knew it. She was just supposed to forget that she knew.

A discrete cough knocked her from her thoughts. The messenger was still waiting for a response. She sighed again and waved one hand loftily. "Bring it to me." She commanded, little of her inner turmoil making it into her voice. She had a long way to go, but she was already good at taking up the cloak of responsibility that she must carry as a Lady of Wutai, daughter of Godo. She must never show weakness to those lower than herself, and must never let herself loose, no matter how much she longed to toss away the ornate robes and arrogant speech and run and fight and laugh and cry and chase the impossible dream she had shared with the others-

What others? There had never been any others. There had never been anyone else who had stood with her at the end of everything, who knew the same as she what it was like to ride the crest of a battle until hunger and pain meant nothing, until everything boiled down to blows given and taken, blows that sang like the nightingale at dusk but a thousand times sweeter. She had never looked into the face of death and laughed even as the world fell around her. She'd have to remember that.

The messenger returned, bearing a package about a foot square, and four inches thick. He set it on the table before her, and bowed before quietly leaving. She sighed before peeling the packaging tape from the box.

Whatever was inside, it was wrapped a second time, this time in brown packaging paper. She turned it over, and her breath caught in her throat. 'Hey, Brat!' was scrawled across the wrapping in black marker.

She had never been Yufaline to them. She had rarely even been Yuffie. It was always Brat, until it stopped being an insult that only Cid and Barett had used and started becoming an actual nickname that all of them had known her by. They had all had their names among themselves, a kind of code only they knew, that bound them ever tighter to each other and their mission.

There was no mission. She had to remember that. She'd never had any purpose but to be a Lady of Wutai.

She ripped off the wrapping and gasped at what she revealed. It was an album, the cover made of thick, red-brown leather. 'Memories' trailed across the front in elegant, flowing script. She opened the book to the first page.

This album is a photographic journal of the journey of Avalanche on it's mission to save the Planet, with special emphasis placed on those events most relevant to Lady Yufaline Kisragi of Wutai, as this album belongs to her. If you who is reading this is not Yufaline Kisragi, close this book now. The contents will not interest you since, according to official records, none of it ever happened.

Midgar, April 26th, 1724

Her heart snagged in her throat. Reeve, she realized. Reeve, with the surveillance he'd gotten from Cait Sith. Most of the pictures would be from Reeve, but not all. Tifa, who'd had a brief obsession with the black and white film she'd picked up in a drug store. Cid, who'd always had a camera on him, who'd jokingly said that he became a pilot because he was a tourist at heart. Barett, who'd mentioned the idea of a memoir of some sort long ago and was always saving things to take back to Marlene, ticket stubs and pamphlets and tiny souvenirs.

They all had a copy, she was sure. Reeve had put them together and sent them out. He was breaking the rules - they weren't supposed to exist - but she doubted any of them would berate him for doing so.

She could forget that Avalanche never existed.

She turned the page, and found her throat strangely tight. The picture was of them, all of them, in the Station of the Gold Saucer, their arms around each other's shoulders and laughing. They looked more like a group of friends going on vacation rather than a group of warriors out to save the world. Beneath the picture was another sheet of typed paper.

Avalanche

October 5th, 1722, Gold Saucer

Charles Andrew Strife . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Spike

Tifana Roseanne Lockheart . . . . . . . . . .Rose

Barett Joseph Wallace . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bear

Aerith Lee Gainsborough . . . . . . . . . . . .Daisy

Nanaki, Son of Seto . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Red

Yufaline Jana Kisragi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Brat

Reeve Adrian Brannon . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cat

Vincent Edward Valentine . . . . . . . . . . .Vamp

Cidney Alan Highwind II . . . . . . . . . . . . Chief

She stared at the list for a long moment, most of it in disbelief, as a hundred questions sprang up in her mind. She had known Tifa's middle name; it was the reason they called her Rose, but she'd never known her full first name. And Cid was actually Cidney? Cloud was Charles?

Where in the bloody blue hell did Reeve find her own middle name?

She kept turning pages. The pictures of the original Avalanche in their cluttered little room beneath the Seventh Heaven intrigued her, she'd of course never met Biggs, Wedge or Jessie. But the pictures from Midgar and such were few and separated by long strands of time. The photographic time line grew tighter as she went along, especially after Cait Sith had joined the group. She saw herself as the others had, wickedly bright and all too teenage for anyone's well being. There was Barett in that ridiculous sailor suit, here was Tifa giving Cloud an impromptu dance lesson, and there was the look on an inn-cooks face as Nanaki politely requested a steak, rare. A very drunk Cid dragging an equally drunk Vincent up on a karaoke stage, Cait Sith gathering a crowd and quite a lot of gil by fortune-telling, Aerith with a huge bouquet of wildflowers that she'd later decorated everyone with. Laughter and tears and pain and joy and all of them growing as close as siblings without ever knowing a lot about each other.

She barely noted the tears sliding down her cheeks. She missed them, so deeply and so completely it ached. She missed being woken an hour after dawn, missed living out of a tattered pack, missed eating from a tin can in the middle of a forest, missed having her blood spilled near-daily, missed being called Brat, missed having her life under a constant threat, missed being an untrustworthy teen among a bunch of adults, missed being more alive and aware than any other time in her life. The blood and pain and discomfort didn't matter. What mattered was that companionship, that entwining, that camerade they'd all had that she'd never experience again, because it was never supposed to exist.

The final pictures, of Meteor, of a destroyed Midgar, even one of Sephiroth himself as she'd always remember him, deformed and beautiful, with one huge wing sprouting from his shoulder. Then a few blank pages at the end of the book. They weren't because of lack of pictures, she knew.

She smiled. The blank pages said that, sometime in the future, a year, two, five, sometime, there'd be another message, this time a letter stating only a place. It'd probably be a bar somewhere, someplace small and anonymous, maybe in Mideel where no one would recognize them. Someplace where they she wouldn't be Yufaline of Wutai, but would be just a Brat, having lunch with her friends, Red and Cat, Chief and Vamp, Spike and Rose and Bear. They would laugh, and talk about their new lives, and maybe Tifa would have a kid with Cloud- Charles (and oh, how she'd rag on him for that name, and she probably wouldn't be the only one) Maybe Marlene would be there with her daddy. Maybe Nanaki would have found a mate, somehow.

Maybe she would be able put away her robes and haughty speech and remember what it was like to stand on the edge of the earth with her friends by her side.

Maybe, for a while, Avalanche would exist.