Disclaimer: I don't own FFVII. And Fremont is very wet.
An: This takes place in the first disc, so Yuffie doesn't know anything about Lucrecia or Vincent's past; also, Aeris is alive. And this is not angst, so don't give up on me when Lucrecia's name comes up.
.:Vicissitudes:.
Yuffie could do a large number of things very well. For example, she could steal the materia off of any person, with the exception of her father. The old man could still kick her ass at acquiring valuable objects illicitly. She figured that it was from all those years of stealing jewelry off of rich visitors while chatting pleasantly to them about the history of Wutai, and his specialty was the wedding ring trick (guaranteed way to lose one's ring for free!). With such a parent, it was no wonder that she became such a thief.
But one thing that she most certainly wasn't an expert in was hair. When she had been a child, ladies in Wutai sometimes spent hours with expert hair dressers to adjust the length of that one lock of hair three inches to the right and ten inches down. Yes, plot the point and find the hair. Yuffie, on the other hand, liked to hack her hair off using a kunai. It was certainly faster and cheaper, but the results weren't always quite so pretty.
So when Yuffie saw Tifa and Aeris giggling as they sat on the inn's beds, brushing each other's hair, she shook her head and decided to walk back out. Obviously, they were occupied with some feminine activity that would probably bore her to death. "Come here, Yuffie!" called Tifa. Yuffie swore silently and turned. They had spotted her already.
"Yeah?" she said, stepping over to the neatly made beds covered with blue checkered blankets. Tifa was brushing Aeris's long, wavy caramel hair. As Yuffie took a seat beside the two women, she had to admire the soft luster of their hair and the slightly prismatic sheen where the sun struck the strands. Unconsciously, she raised a hand to her own roughly cut hair and wished for a moment that she could be so beautiful too.
"So, Yuffie. You're always hanging around Vincent all the time," said Tifa as she worked at a slight knot in Aeris's hair. Though Tifa's fingers seemed ever so delicate, Yuffie had seen her punch a man halfway across a room when he leered at her. And that didn't even include a tenth of the violence she used when someone had unwisely tried to steal her wallet. Tifa may have had a womanly side, but her warrior qualities would always be present.
"It's not like I want to," dissembled Yuffie automatically as she plopped down on the mattress. It was true that she spent a lot of time with the gunman, but it was mostly because Cloud so often placed them in a group. Yuffie had a sneaking suspicion that Cloud feared her um, rather social personality and that he was just dumping her on poor Vincent's lap to deal with. Not that she minded much. At first, his aloofness had pricked at her and she so often became bored in his presence that she resorted to begging to be in Cloud's group. But then of course, Cloud happily obliged and added her onto his party. With Vincent.
But as time passed, she came to know him better. She became expert at reading his moods through his silences, and soon even Cloud came to her to interpret the difference between "…" and "……". (The first one meant that he supported Cloud's decision, whereas the second connoted a slightly different nuance of assent. It meant that Vincent agreed, but only because Cloud was leader. It had taken Yuffie two weeks of close observation before she deciphered that one.)
Gradually, she came to enjoy his presence and she believed that he did too. Unlike Cid or Barret, and sometimes even Tifa and Aeris, Vincent never judged—he only listened. Sometimes, she chattered on as he voicelessly followed her, and she would think that he was just blocking her out. But then he would make a wry comment or a surprisingly funny remark, and she would feel once again that he was far more complex than she had thought.
"Isn't that right, Yuffie?" came Aeris's voice.
"Huh?" she said, jerked out of her thoughts. Aeris and Tifa looked at her expectantly, then started giggling at her look of confusion. "What?" she demanded, but they only laughed some more and whispered between themselves. Miffed, the young shinobi crossed her arms over her chest and waited for them to finally stop.
"Aeris was asking you if you knew the secret of Vincent's hair," said Tifa. Aeris nodded and they both looked at her, waiting for the answer.
Yuffie made a face and remembered why she didn't spend time with girls in her younger days. "What the hell? Why would you want to know something like that?"
"Because he has really nice hair!" exclaimed Aeris in her dulcet voice. Tifa nodded enthusiastically in agreement. "Haven't you seen it? I don't think we have ever found a split end in there…"
"And you want me to just walk up and ask him, 'Hey Vinnie. What's the secret of your hair?'" she said incredulously.
"Yes!" they answered, and then Aeris gave Yuffie a curious look. "You call him Vinnie?"
She gasped and clapped a hand over her mouth. Her private nickname for the tall man had just slipped out so carelessly; now they would tease her to no end. "No, I said Vincent!" she lied.
"No, you said Vinnie," replied Tifa with conviction. The fighter turned to the flower girl and they shared a look. "Isn't that cute, Aeris?"
"Yes it is," she said. "Do you have a crush on someone, Yuffie?"
Her face betrayed her as she considered the thought. "No I don't! And shut up!"
Her retort only intensified the evil looks on their faces. "Let's make a deal," said Tifa conspiratorially. "If you get us information about how Vincent gets his hair to be so nice, we'll just let the whole thing drop."
"And?"
"And if you don't, then we'll just talk loudly about your crush in front of everybody!"
Yuffie made a mental note never again to barge in when Tifa and Aeris were doing their hair.
…
Later that day, in the evening, Yuffie stepped out of bathroom with a towel wrapped around her dripping hair. It was growing long again, and she frowned at it as she sat down in front of a mirror in the corner of the room. She let the towel drop and stared the tangled mess of dark brown on her head. It was just a bit lighter than Tifa's hair, with some parts bleached by the sun. Normally, when it was dry, she did not bother with it and just let it hang, though her headband kept it out of her face.
Looking at the sturdy wooden comb she held in her hand, she sighed and began the war against her hair. She tried the subtle approach first, coaxing the comb through the dark strands. As expected, the comb lodged itself into the hair with a monster-like grip and refused to get out or move. Yuffie gritted her teeth and tried to extricate the little implement, but only did so while pulling quite a number of strands out of her head. "Ow!" All right, so negotiating with her hair was out of the question. And if diplomacy failed, then it was time for brute force. "Come on, Yuffie!" she said, grabbing a section of her hair and gritting her teeth. Her first attack was a savage jab at the ends as she tried to rip through the kinks.
"Ah!" A sharp pain shot through her scalp. She now had at least ten pieces of hair KIA (Killed in Action). Her hair was a tenacious enemy, but she had expected no less from a part of her body. This was going to be a hard battle—she hoped that she would not have to resort to total war. Yuffie bared her teeth and growled at the mirror. She was Yuffie Kisaragi, princess of Wutai! She would not let a measly hair issue defeat her!
"What are you doing?" A voice intoned behind her, the deep monotone colored by a bit of curiosity. She turned, the comb still obstinately hanging onto her hair. There stood Vincent, leaning against the doorway with a bemused expression on his face.
"Um…hi!" she said. Now if she could only get the comb's very annoying teeth out of her hair, then perhaps she wouldn't look so ridiculous. She yanked, and nearly screamed as the comb let go—of half of her hair. Her face contorted from pain and she froze, trying to lessen the damage. "I'm doing absolutely nothing! Keep doing whatever you were doing!" she gasped weakly, turning back to the mirror.
Vincent watched this whole process with a dead-pan face. Then he sighed and strode into the room, placing a hand on hers. She stopped and looked up, confused by his action. "Let go," he commanded.
She blinked, then obeyed. "What are you—?" He shushed her with a finger on her lips. Then, he drew the comb out somehow and began running it through her hair with slow, careful movements. She had tensed at first, but was pleasantly surprised when she felt no pain. "You're really good at this, Vinnie," she said. Perhaps there was some truth in the whole "secret of his hair" thing; how else would he know how to deal with hair so well?
He worked through a knot with a methodical approach, gradually freeing and straightening her hair. "I often did this, a long time ago," he answered. Her eyes glanced up in the mirror to meet the reflection of his.
"You had long hair back then?" she asked, imagining him as a Turk with long hair. "Did you look like Tseng?"
"No and no. But I used to do this for Lucrecia…" The way he said the unfamiliar name was so melancholy, and Yuffie immediately sensed that the name carried memories, most likely painful ones. She did not say anything and only listened, as he had so often done for her. "She would laugh at my clumsiness before teaching me the proper way to do it." A ghost of a smile appeared on his lips. "She never pushed me away, even in our later days at Nibelheim…"
The motion of the comb in her hair ceased, and she ran a hand through her hair to find that he was perfectly smooth. He looked away and placed the comb down on the mattress beside her. "She never needed me, but she let me brush her hair anyway," he said pensively. She never needed him at all for anything, to tell the truth, though he could not admit it. Lucrecia had proved it well enough when she left him for Hojo, that bastard who merely used her for his own experiments.
Yuffie stared up at Vincent in the mirror and saw it in that moment, the stirring of an emotion so long suppressed within himself, yet never lessening in intensity. There was a moment when his ruby-tinted eyes became liquid with the power of a force that obviously still clawed at his soul so long after his sleep. But the moment passed in an instant, and his gaze once again became opaque, the flames fading back to the dullness of glass.
He noticed her unusual silence and mistook it for discomfort in his presence. He sighed slightly and rose to leave—why should he have expected that she would act differently? Even Aeris feared him, though it was overshadowed by her caring instinct; but still, the seed of fear was there.
"Hey, don't go," she said softly, surprising him. Yuffie hesitated, then reached out to take his hand in her small ones. "Hey, if she didn't need you to do her hair, that's okay. I need you."
He looked down at his pale, skeletal hand gripped lightly in her calloused but fine fingers, and smiled faintly. She saw it, and grinned. "Otherwise, I'd look like Cloud…" she muttered, a wry look on her face. "Now sit here and do something fancy to my hair. Or teach me how to do it…"
He sighed good-naturedly and acquiesced, beginning to braid Yuffie's shoulder-length hair into a complex rope. They sat for a while in companionable silence, before Yuffie spoke.
"Hey Vinnie. What's the secret of your hair?"
His eyes shifted to hers in the mirror, slightly confused. "What secret?"
"Oh come on. There's gotta be some reason your hair is so pretty."
He laughed quietly. "If you want to know…"
…
"…it's natural," she reported. Tifa and Aeris's faces simultaneously fell with disappointment and shock.
"What?"
"Yep. He does absolutely nothing to it." The two girls sighed and comforted each other, both bemoaning the irony of the world when a man who had been stuck in a rotting mansion for thirty years could have hair that was more beautiful than a twenty-year old woman's.
As Yuffie pulled her face into an appropriately commiserating expression, she hid her grin and fingered the little scrap of paper in her right hand. So the shampoo was "Linden Blossom," huh?
…
AN: Arg! This chapter was so bad…I'm going to fix it later. I'm going to review my SAT vocabulary and upgrade my writing for next chapter. It seems that I have a mild case of writer's block. Sorry for the cliché-ness of the last chapter! And please tell me if I start repeating plot elements or descriptive phrases, because all my past writing is starting to become muddled in my mind.
White Day is coming up in two days! For those unacquainted with Japanese culture, White Day is March 14, exactly one month after Valentine's. This is when guys give gifts back to girls in thanks for the Valentine's Day gift. Let's take a vote. Who thinks I should write a sequel to "The Sweetest Chocolate" in celebration of White Day? If you want to vote, do it quickly!
