Disclaimer: Writing these disclaimers bores me, but it is necessary to say that I lay no claim to anything of Square Enix's, including FFVII.
AN: I feel like I'm having a real dialogue with my reviewers here, and I love all my reviewers! I just want to say that…but I'm really tired right now. This next drabble/one-shot or whatever occurred after consumption of unhealthy amounts of cake (that I made for myself since my parents did not even remember my birthday), so be warned of the sugar high. And thank you so much for giving me reviews and telling me happy birthday! That was one of the best birthday presents I could have gotten…so thank you! I love you guys!
.:Vicissitudes:.
The morning air nipped at Yuffie's bare arms as she jogged up the ancient, grass-covered path to the top of the hill. The pebbles beneath her sneakers still glimmered slightly in the clean blue-white of the pre-dawn sky. She had always loved this mile-long run, a bit of warm up to wake her fully before the group set out once more. The air was always crisp but a pleasure to breathe, for it smelled just of the simple scents of crushed grass, wet earth, and morning glory.
The little glass jar and the paper strips were stowed safely in her pack beside the Conformer, and she smiled in anticipation as her legs carried her up the winding path, her shoes just lightly striking the ground. This was her morning ritual, one that she had started ever since she was just a child in Wutai. No matter where Cloud traveled, she always made sure to search for a place of solitude a bit away from the camp for this, and she never missed a day despite occasional rain. The first couple times she did it, Cloud had looked at her funny, but the grouphad soon learned to disregard it as just another one of her idiosyncrasies.
Breathing lightly, she reached the top of the hill and sighed happily at the panoramic view that greeted her. A river ran across the flat, grassy plains, its waters currently dark and murky in the half-light. Trees dotted the land in small clumps and copses, but the landscape was marred by bleak stretches of dead dirt and rock, the results of mako draining by Shinra. Scanning the scene, she spotted the black dot that was their camp.
Yuffie sat down and leaned against the gnarled tree that had probably spent a thousand lonely years on top the hill. She took the jar out and raised it to her eyes to survey her progress. Paper stars of all sizes and colors filled the container halfway; some of them were made of ornate, traditional Wutaian paper while others were just folded of plain, white letter paper. "Still a whole lot more to go," she muttered to herself, and drew the new bundle of star paper out.
Settling herself, she began the quiet task of folding the simple origami. It was so easy—just a flattened knot at one end of the strip, followed by the repeated pattern, ending with just puffing the pentagon into a star. As her hands automatically followed through the actions, her mind wandered and the hilltop was silent save for the whistling of the wind.
But despite her sharp hearing and the quiet of her surroundings, she never heard him approach. She was just finishing a star and dropping it into the jar when his voice spoke from just feet away. "What are you doing?"
"Ah!" she screamed, her hand jerking violently and upsetting the jar, spilling some out onto the wet grass. Clutching her heart with one hand and a hidden kunai with the other, she whirled and gritted her teeth, preparing to fight. "You're going to get—urph!" she yelled, a gust of wind suddenly blowing a piece of red cloth into her mouth.
"Impressive," came a dry, familiar voice.
"Shut up, Vinnie!" Yuffie yelled, her heart rate slowing considerably as she realized who had sneaked up on her. Whipping the heavy material of his cloak away with some difficulty, she glared up into her long-time friend and companion's face. It was enigmatic as ever, but she could see the amusement in the slight crinkle at the edges of his stunning eyes. "Your cloak is evil! It's trying to kill your lovely friend, the sexy Great Ninja Yuffie. Aren't you going to take revenge and kill your cloak?" she asked accusingly.
"No, I believe that my cloak is atoning for its recent sins against you, Yuffie, and that I have no need to torture it more," he dead-panned, gracefully lowering himself to the ground beside her. She rumbled a noise of annoyance and deposited approximately twenty strips of paper into his lap. He raised a faultless eyebrow at her, and she secretly wondered if he plucked them. There was no human way that a man, even an anatomically reconstructed, mako-enhanced ex-Turk, could have neater eyebrows than Tifa did. The woman was crazy—she spent at least twenty minutes in the morning primping her hair, and yet here was Vincent, ostensibly looking better than the fighter did without any concern for his appearance at all.
"YOU are going to fold those into stars."
"…"
"You spilled all those into the grass, so you have to help me," she said, indicating the ten or so dirtied paper creations in the dirt. "You know how to make stars, Mr. Valentine. Right?"
He shrugged and began twisting the paper in his fine-boned pianist's hands, the star forming with a speed that reckoned hers. She whistled, staring at his adroit movements with surprise. After a bit, she noticed that he had purposely chosen to sit on the windy side and was now blocking most of the chill for her. Smiling, she began on her own, and they folded for a while in companionable silence.
"Hey, do they teach you that in Turk school?"
"What?"
"Does Shinra have an origami class to train their Turks?"
He snorted in slight derision. Of course, being Vincent, it was a very elegant, refined sort of snort—almost a disdainful sniff. Far from the horse-with-snot-in-its-nose sound that Barret made. Smirking at this thought, Yuffie continued.
"Do you guys get to wear frilly pink skirts or lacy white dresses in the class?" At this comment, Vincent glared at her pointedly and shifted slightly to allow the wind to buffet her face once again. She pouted. "Hey, it was just a question!"
They completed five more stars before he spoke again. "What is the reason for this?"
She answered absently while puffing her star. "What? The reason why I want to know what kind of dresses you guys wore?"
"Yuffie."
"Okay, okay, sheesh," she said, tossing the finished star into the jar. But her face became serious, and her voice was soft and low when she spoke. "I started making stars when I was six,before the Wutai War."
A wistful smile appeared upon her face. "I still remember how I was back then. I wasn't always bad, you know," she said, turning to look into Vincent's eyes. "I wasn't the best child in the world, but I wasn't too much of a brat."
Vincent's hands had grown still as he listened, and Yuffie's eyes were now staring into the brightening sky. A crescent of gold had appeared atop the hill, piercing their eyes with the light. "My mother was still alive back then. She taught me a lot of things, but one of the things that I remember the most was when she taught me how to fold stars." Yuffie looked down at the strips of paper, their gilded designs spangled with morning sun.
"She told me once that a star was more than just a folded piece of paper, that it had a tradition as old as Leviathan itself. She said Wutai was made when Leviathan saw the stars for the first time, glimmering over the surface of the clear blue sea. Their beauty dazzled Leviathan, and he leapt into the sky to reach them."
She laughed as she repeated the familiar words, laden in tradition; her voice was cadenced with the sing-song of story-telling. "But as we know, the stars are like the dead; they rest in another world completely, one where the pain and strife of this world is transformed to their light and splendor. And just the same way, their sorrow is our love. It is a world that we can never reach, for it is the reflection of our souls."
"And as Leviathan leapt, he flew majestically into the sky and reached as high as he could, his ascent trailing droplets of water everywhere. He reached so high that he saw the ghostly turrets of cloud castles floating in the sky and the trails of ice crystals left by Shiva's journeys. But even the moon grew in his sight, he could feel it—the ties of gravity. And he fell, crashing to the ocean, his descent breaking the water in tidal waves that rippled across the Planet. He fell so far that he crashed into the rock that lined the ocean, breaking it in an arc across the sea."
"And that was how the Wutai cape was formed, from the blood-stained pieces of the ocean bottom."
"How does that relate to stars?"
She laughed. "It's kind of a stupid tradition, really. We say that we fold stars to make Leviathan happy, because he likes them so much. If you think about it, he probably hates them a whole lot, since we're dangling things that he can't get in front of his spiky nose." The deep intonation that had accented her voice was completely gone, the youthful cheer once again permeating the sound.
He picked up another strip and began the process, the simple process like a meditation. It would soon be time to go back, before Cloud began wringing his lethally sharp spikes of hair. But Yuffie's voice broke into his pragmatic thoughts again.
"But my mom told me differently. She said that our wishes are like stars—we can hope but we'll probably never reach them. But we fold them anyway because each is a fragment of our soul, another bit that will maybe someday reach Leviathan and build a bridge for him to the sky. And maybe, when he's achieved the impossible, he'll listen to us and in return, we'll be able to fly into the light too."
Dropping a final star into the jar, she clambered up with loud cracks from her joints. "Hey, Vinnie, let's go back. I bet Cloud's so worried that he's ruined his hair already." He rose silently and helped her pack up the papers and jar.
As they started down the road, the white faces of morning glories greeted them, their petals awash with the reds and oranges of sunrise. Vincent watched as Yuffie skipped ahead of him, her brown hair struck with golden threads in the warm light, and he felt a sense of peace that he had not felt for a long time. After a stubbed toe on a rather mischievous root, Yuffie returned to his side and loudly plopped her feet at his slow pace, exaggerating her impatience. "Vinnie, you're so slow, like an old man!" But then she giggled and dropped the act. "But I guess it's because you got so bored by my story that you're half-awake right now…it's not like you like talking anyway…"
"No, I enjoyed it," he answered softly, and it was the truth. Though he had learned the Wutaian legends during his Turk days, he had never heard it retold by a true native. And the folding of the stars was the closest to tranquility he had ever felt since his coffin had been reopened.
She turned to him in surprise, and smiled in happiness.
Yes…perhaps if he folded enough stars and sent his wishes to Leviathan, just maybe he too would reach the light someday.
…
AN: Sorry if I wrote this slowly. Actually, I wrote most of it while my father was being a hypocritical bastard, saying that he "cares for me" and that I'm a "rude, insolent brat." In the same sentence, I swear. Ah well…life will go on, even if I hate my parents. I do love reviews though! Thanks for reading this! And yes, I do love folding stars and I actually folded about 150 during the writing of this chapter. Hooray for time-consuming, useless, but whimsical Asian origami practices!
