A/N: I've been writing a monster of a Yuffentine, and back in July I lost around five whole pages of it. While it doesn't seem like much, it felt like a huge chunk to me at the time and I refused to even think about writing more of it until I got it back. Well, the computer that ate it never did give it back, so in terrible bitterness I wrote this instead.
Rust
He is ten years over sixty when the birds stop singing and Yuffie is gone, left home with a note that says,
I am gone and gone and gone forever and shit shit shit I am gone good-bye
And Vincent does not understand until the day three months later when her medical records are discovered and Yuffie's headband is found in a river.
He often blames himself. He often blames others. But he doesn't blame Yuffie, never Yuffie, because Yuffie was Yuffie and how could he blame her when she always smiled, just in that one way, always smiled just like that and made it special just for him?
He can't, he couldn't, he could never - never, when she smiled, just for him, he-
Vincent misses Yuffie.
And it hurts.
He is seventeen years over sixty and his days are made of bumbling around his lonely house, doing nothing but sitting and reading and sleeping, and sometimes eating if Vincent remembers. He thinks.
The only time Vincent will step outside is when he wants to tend to the little garden out back. It is very pretty, and Vincent doesn't remember how it got there, but he always feels much better when he tries to clumsily water the plants. All grace is gone when he tries to help something, even if he can be the most lethal thing on Gaia when he tries to destroy.
It is one of these moments when he feels fine and almost normal, one of these moments that are few and far between while he is crouching outside in all the plants with twilight towering overhead, when he is paid a visit by a cat. It is a very young cat, less than a year old, and Vincent knows this because Yuffie once owned a dozen cats and enlisted him to help when three different cats had their litters at the same time, and he was stuck with several kittens of his own that he ended up dropping off for Marlene and Denzel.
This cat is one of the most wonderful things he's seen with matted fur, torn ears, starved belly and crooked tail. With the way its life is leading it, it probably doesn't have much longer left in this world, Vincent can surmise, and he wonders what keeps this small existence fueled. It approaches him with a high head regardless, as if it understands itself to be one of the most important things to walk the Planet, and carefully sits down facing him. It is black with large gray eyes and watches Vincent with what he assumes is curiosity.
He dips his head to it in silent acknowledgment and finishes watering the plants. When he moves to stand up, the cat moves so quickly Vincent does not even register what is happening until his cheek hurts, and the battered cat retracts its claws as three thin lines begin to dribble blood down his face. It cheekily jumps over the wall and, with one last flick of its broken tail, is gone.
Vincent watches the place where the cat disappeared for a long while until he goes inside to wipe off his already healed cheek, sitting down on a chair after.
These are what his days are made of, doing nothing but sitting and reading and sleeping and maybe eating if he remembers, and thinking too. He thinks often. Right now he thinks of life and death, and how strange friendship is. He thinks of how he was able to move on from the scientist but how he can't bring himself to stop pretending Yuffie is still alive, and he wonders why he keeps his phone on, waiting for a call that isn't coming.
He is twenty years over eighty when he doesn't like looking at anyone except Nanaki anymore, because Nanaki is the same and barely older. He tries helping the residents of Cosmo Canyon as best he can, feeling settled only when he and his old friend can talk comfortably as another day ends.
"You are very lonely," Nanaki observes as they sit in companionable not-silence at the top of the canyon, looking down at the not-city.
If anything, Nanaki is, too. Vincent knows this because in the past several years, the scientists (the ones who do not wear lab coats and are some of the nicest people Vincent has met) tried to clone Nanaki.
Vincent knows this because the first attempt failed. The second attempt yielded a young cub that collapsed just months in. The last attempt was a strong-willed female, to everyone's surprise, a strong-willed female that was more feline than canine with a feral smile so familiar and an affinity for games and trying to take things that weren't hers because she enjoyed it, and her only problem was that she couldn't speak, even if she had so much to say.
It hurt, a lot, when the respiratory problems caused by her blocked voice box made Vincent's new friend cry and cry and cry and curl up in his lap like the cub she wasn't anymore until she shivered and stopped moving.
"Perhaps," Vincent replies, and in his head Yuffie smiles and her laughter tinkles around like chimes in the breeze, in the house in the town he has not visited since he was seventy-two.
Vincent accepts it, one day.
He is sitting with Nanaki, early in the evening when the sun is still watching him, and they are outside on the cliff edge of where Bugenhagen's observatory stands, sitting with his legs hanging off and Nanaki's nose in danger of plummeting straight down to the canyons below or falling right up into the cosmos, and of which Vincent isn't sure.
They talk of life, renewal, death, emotions, and a lot of things Vincent usually doesn't like to vocalize. As they lapse into companionable silence, it dawns on Vincent suddenly that his phone isn't going to ring because only Yuffie calls it, and Yuffie is gone (shitshit gone gone), good-bye, and she didn't say good-bye to him, not really.
He fishes his phone from his pocket carefully, his rusty old phone that is chipped and scratched and even bent where he once forgot and used his claw to answer it instead. Vincent looks at the PHS that still has many numbers, numbers that still work and numbers that have been out of commission for a long time, and drops it. He watches it fall down and hit a rock, sliding to hit another and another (clack clack clack, shit shit shit gone forever good-bye) until it is lost to the depths of the orange-red canyon.
This is when he cries.
He is seven years over ninety which is too old, too old, when he walks back to the house that Vincent surprisingly finds is still standing and still empty. It is old and lonely and dusty, which suits him well enough. Vincent cleans it out anyway.
The garden in the back has died. He can tell just by looking out the spotty window, and doesn't bother to go out. He is not a gardener.
Instead, after he wipes away the spiderwebs, brushes the dust off the cabinets, and tries to beat the dirt off a rug or two, Vincent leaves the house and walks to the market. He enjoys the atmosphere. He buys food and after goes home to put it into the old refrigerator, looking at the measly pile before closing the door and sitting down.
Vincent doesn't know what to do with himself. If anything, he is very weak, and a distraction sounds nice. He walks to the market the next day, and the day after that, too. He doesn't mind sitting on a bench and thinking as much as sitting alone and thinking. Sometimes he feels awkward when people look at him, because his claw is still strange and stuck over the hand that is probably rotten by now, so he buys a notebook and a pen and sits with both. He never uses them.
He does this all of November. When a girl offers him a scarf for ten gil one day, Vincent buys it without hesitation and his slim fingers pick the simple blue scarf. He imagines Yuffie scowling at him before snatching the orange scarf to wind it around herself laughingly, taking something not hers and enjoying it.
In December, Vincent notices a young boy that laughs a lot. He's amusing to watch, a beacon of true sunshine to the other people. This boy was the one to buy the orange scarf, and he has a bright smile with two missing teeth and gray eyes with circles that could rival Vincent's lining the bottoms of them. Some days Vincent doesn't see the boy help his brother sell the half-rotten fruit that Vincent wouldn't want to eat, compared to the much nicer selection down the rows of booths.
In January, he is startled to see the boy's picture in the obituaries of the local newspaper.
Vincent doesn't go to the market anymore.
"Did you love me?" Yuffie asks him one day.
This is the day Vincent goes into the garden and is surprised to find that it isn't dead at all. It is teeming with life, though of a good kind or bad, he isn't sure. Vincent has never been very good with understanding which plants are weeds and which plants are actual flowers, but the few bad ones he can spot he pulls. Yuffie sits on the single crumbling wall to his left, and he can see her yellow sneakers from the corner of his eye. She hasn't worn them since she was sixteen, he thinks. Her heels beat restlessly against the sun-dried bricks.
Vincent doesn't reply until he finishes pulling the last weed. After he sets it down carefully in the trash bag, he sits down and finds that he is afraid to look up. So he doesn't.
"Yes," he says honestly. His throat is made of sand-paper. She laughs at him.
"I'll be seeing you, Vinners," and she hops off the wall to walk away. When she is gone, Vincent tries to breathe, but it doesn't work very well. He slowly walks inside his house to drink warm water, and goes outside after to wait for a long time, until he wakes up again and is covered in dew, and she is still gone. He isn't very surprised, but his throat is still sandpaper
and it hurts.
Too old, too old and six years over one-hundred; Vincent is wandering around in a not-town still too small to be a city, the ratty little hotel room suiting him well enough. This place makes him think of deserted cities long dead, and he likes sitting in a chair and looking out the window that isn't as spotty as the ones in his house.
A young woman is standing on a corner, trying to sell flowers. She is lively and jumpy and very colorful, with a fast mouth and quick hands. He buys a flower from her one day, and she smiles brightly. He notices that she has shorter dark hair that is clumsily done up in a braid like a faulty imitation tied in an old ribbon, wearing a beautiful, spotted, torn skirt that's badly stitched and a short but blindingly orange shirt that bares a gaunt navel. She is a piece of patchwork and warms him.
Only later does Vincent realize that he is missing twenty gil. And only later than that, when he has returned home, does he realize that the talk of his own town is about the not-town once too small to be a city that burned down to the ground just yesterday with only a handful of survivors. Vincent checks the news. The patchwork girl is not one of them.
He stumbles from the house and falls into the bare wine cellar, lurching into an empty cabinet big enough to hold a huddling man. He doesn't so much as shift for years.
When Vincent is one year until hitting one-hundred-and-forty-three, he doesn't know what to do with himself anymore and he leaves his little house, forgetting all the books and silences and small meals and garden. He has nothing more than the familiar, old old clothes on his back and the weight on his shoulders and the comforting presence of his gun in its holster.
When he leaves, he doesn't know where he's going, or why he's going, or when he's getting wherever it is that he's going to. He walks.
And when he walks, he sees eyes and smiles and tails and scarves all so familiar. He wonders if this is her way of telling him something.
He asks her one day. And this time he doesn't hesitate to look up (and is not surprised to find her headband missing). She is grinning at him like the ninja she still is, and she pulls at his hand and his cape and makes him stand up.
"You've been wondering that for a while, huh?" she asks. Vincent finds he can't say anything, like his voice box isn't working like the clone who wrote her name was Princess Aurora, and Yuffie's smile widens.
"I had to, y'know. I wasn't taking it drawn out and long. And it was so easy, and Aeris forgave me and shit, I'm sorry," she tells him while the grass moves beneath him.
Vincent dips his head in a nod and smiles a real one. Yuffie smiles again and disappears, and this time he does, too
and he is content.