Title: The Difference (2/3)
Author: Rose Flame
Theme(s): #14 - craven, democracy, aristocrat
Pairing/Characters: Yuffie/Vincent, Godo, Cid
Rating: M
Warnings: AU. War. Adultery. Angst. Death. (It's not as bad as it sounds. There's also candy, and a rock collection.) Also minor loli, I guess.
Disclaimer: Don't own, don't sue.
Summary: Hojo gives Vincent one last chance to change everything; a chance Vincent, surprisingly, takes.
- - - - - - - - - -
Vincent stays with Godo and his daughter until the treaties are signed. Yuffie falls into disturbed slumber shortly into the procedure, and Godo is forced to hand his girl back to Vincent while he reads and grits his teeth at every concession his village is forced to make.
Vincent sits behind Godo, behind Godo's sweat-streaked advisors, and holds Yuffie in his arms as she whimpers plaintively in her sleep. Even as he speaks a wordless soothing murmur to her and strokes his human fingers over her hair, he cannot take his eyes from the shimmering turquoise 'scale' fastened around Sephiroth's neck.
- - - - - - - - - -
For the first few weeks, Vincent half-expects to see a familiar dark head pop up out of the shrubs, subdued, but still full of that insatiable want to spend time with him. It doesn't happen that way. In fact, it is months before he sees her again, when he has almost given up hope, and he is almost horrified at what he sees.
The whole side of her face is bruised to dark green, swollen and angry with the exercise. She wears a brace for her left shoulder, another for her leg. He stares at her for a few moments in surprise. She puts both hands on her hips, proving that she isn't that hindered by her injuries, and says, "You're supposed to be happy to see me, y'know!"
Vincent straightens quickly. He has been picking up rocks she might like, in her absence, and does not want to be caught adding to her circle. She has expressed dislike of this before. He cannot say why he does it still; she always notices. "Yuffie. It's been a while."
He is suddenly uncertain what to say.
She strolls into the clearing, favouring one leg a little more than the other, and frowns down at her circle. "Vinnie, you messed it all up..." She crouches, wincing a little, and begins to pick up the rocks he has added over the weeks and months she has been missing from his life. He crosses the circle and picks her up; she squeaks and then giggles, settling herself on his smooth golden forearm.
"I had to give you something to do when you came back," he tells her, noticing the change in her girl's body. She has been training fiercely, she must have been; her muscles are far more developed than he remembers. "What did you do to your face?"
"Vinnie!" Yuffie punches him in the chest and that, too, has changed. It throbs at him urgently for a few seconds before settling into the more usual grumble of pain. "Papa's sending me on missions now. Isn't that cool?"
Vincent thinks of the restrained grief-madness that he has seen lurking in Godo's eyes, and wonders. "If that is what you do to yourself on a regular basis, then I do not think you are shaping up to be a very good ninja, Yuffie."
She punches him again, but he knows immediately it was the wrong thing to say; there is sadness in her so deep and aching it is a wonder she has not shattered to dust in his palm. "Hey! This is from the pagoda. I beat old Gorky, too! Heh. You shoulda seen it; he was steamed." Her smile does not quite reach her eyes. Vincent wonders why that should hurt worse than tears.
"Would you like to help me catch fish? Winter is coming."
"Okay! I'll show you my ninja stealth!"
"...just don't fall in," He cannot help but add. Her furious screech of reprimand is somehow reassuring.
- - - - - - - - - -
Less and less, he sees of her.
An afternoon when winter ends, to show him how well she can use materia. He reveals to her the embarrassing and carefully hidden Shield and Restore, and she tries unsuccessfully to steal them from him three times before he threatens to swallow it. She leaves him again with a sullen expression and a vow that she'll get it from him one day. He lets her, with derision, and the promise that she won't.
He works to master the materia in her absence, clearing the forest of fiends for miles around. His claw does not seem to wear, no matter how he uses it. He is not the only one to notice. When Yuffie ventures into the clearing some months later, surprisingly tall and thin for an twelve-year-old, she stares at him pensively for a few minutes and asks, "Are you a god, Vinnie?"
Vincent is bewildered. "What? No."
Yuffie is adamant. "You must be. Or something. How come you're always the same?"
As Vincent stares into the distance, wondering how to respond, he knows his face has stilled, grown cold. She isn't used to seeing him that way, any more.
"A long time ago, there was a man... well. Come sit down. This could take some time."
- - - - - - - - - -
He does not see her for the longest time, after that. He has moved from wood to stone, in vicious attempts to make a mark upon the claw that has replaced his left forearm. He is entirely unsuccessful. The claw resists the change as stubbornly as his body resists the tug of time, remaining just as it was that day when he ran from all he thought he loved the most.
He is hunting for good, solid stone to further his attempts when he hears a feminine throat clear itself behind him. He turns, surprised to have been caught unawares, and spies a lovely slip of a lady, beaming at him and holding a Restore and a Shield materia like some people hold cards between her thieving fingertips.
"Told you I'd get it one day, Vinnie."
He checks his gun. He stares at her some more. And then he smiles, for he has not seen her for so long that the sight of her near makes his throat ache. "Yuffie. Well done."
She practically skips down the slight slope toward him, hopping easily over the dozens of roots and treacherous hidden hollows in the dead leaves on the ground. "Guess where I went," she singsongs, and grabs his hands with both of hers. He shakes his head, mystified, and she grins, glad to have him fooled.
"Nibelheim! Well, I went lots of other places, too, but I went to Nibelheim. It's pretty, I guess, but everyone there is sort of weird… were they always really shifty and fake?"
Vincent frowns at her. "You have been to Nibelheim, have you?"
She grins. "Yep. The mountains are really creepy. But - hey, I went everywhere! You should see Rocket Town! They've got this real live space tower there! And Gold Saucer - omigawd, Vincent, it's so pretty and colourful! I can hardly go in there without my eyes bugging out of my head!"
Vincent, swept away in the tide of her enthusiasm, manages a smile. "You are indeed a small town girl. Did you visit Midgar?"
Yuffie snorts and turns up her nose at the suggestion. "No. Why'd I want to go somewhere like that? I've seen pictures. Midgar's ugly, as well as profane. Leviathan wouldn't be caught dead raining on that place."
"Hmm." Vincent cannot help but agree. "What were you doing, travelling so far a-field?"
Yuffie digs in her pockets and presents him with an odd assortment of items, as well as six or seven brightly glowing materia orbs. He stares at them, and something clicks in his head. "Don't tell me-"
"Aw, c'mon, Vinnie. They won't hardly miss 'em. They're only little baby materia, anyway - you couldn't stop a Nibel cub with these things. But that'll change once I train and master 'em... look, see the little ring of motes, here?" She holds what Vincent thinks is an All materia up to her nose, pointing at the insides like there's something to see other than pale blue crystal.
"No, Yuffie."
She sticks out her tongue. "Your eyes are getting old, Vinnie. This one's about to go up to level two. Do you know how much mastered materia go for overseas?"
And so it goes, and on, and on. By the time she turns for home, Vincent is exhausted with listening to her. But before she leaves him alone in the forest, she hesitates, as though she's forgotten something important.
Uncertainly, she hugs him around the middle. Vincent tilts his head at her, and raises his arms to pull her close. She relaxes into him, as though she belongs there. "I have missed you," he admits. "Be careful, on your adventures."
Yuffie's grip on him tightens as she grins into his torso. "Can't get rid of me that easily, Vinnie. I'm the Great Ninja Yuffie!"
Vincent ruffles her hair fondly as she turns to go. "You are a liar and a thief," he tells her, severity making a valiant play for dominance in his tone. "And you should not stay away so long. How do you expect to rule a village you spend half your life away from?"
Yuffie flicks him the victory sign with her fingers, throwing a confident wink over her shoulder as she slips into the shadows. "Gotta buy it back before I rule it, Vinnie. I'll see you in another couple months."
- - - - - - - - - -
She keeps her appointments surprisingly well, returning every season to astonish him with her gradually budding beauty. (Her height no longer seems to change, though he patiently notches it into his doorframe every time she comes to call. When she turns to see the same height notch, only deeper, she accuses him of not measuring her at all, and socks him solidly in the shoulder. He maintains it barely heals when she's back to punish him for something that is not his fault, again.)
It seems to Vincent that this arrangement suits them both well. He is so desperate for her presence that when she returns he pays her all the attention she firmly believes she is due, drinking down her words and tales of places he remembers so differently, so very differently. The world, it seems, has changed and gone along without him.
One June, she doesn't come back.
He waits, all through July and into August.
In September, he looks up at the night sky and spies a star stranger and brighter than the rest. Uneasiness curdles in his belly, and he finds himself suddenly concerned that his gun, his primary weapon (for which Yuffie occasionally purchases him ammunition), is not in perfect working order.
Over the next three days, it becomes clear to him that it is not a star, it is a meteor, and it will pass alarmingly close to the Planet - if not obliterate it entirely.
On the fifth day, he walks to Wutai.
- - - - - - - - - -
Godo is far older than Vincent remembers, once-black hair now bearing streaks of white at the temples. His eyebrows are outrageous, and set in a concerned scowl, when Vincent arrives unannounced upon his doorstep.
"Where is Yuffie?" Vincent demands.
After a full forty-five seconds of irritated blustering, Godo tells him, "Off risking her fool head, fighting against Sephiroth! What else would you expect from my idiot of a daughter?"
Vincent stares at him carefully and says, "Sephiroth is dead. He died in a reactor accident in Nibelheim."
Godo snorts, as though Vincent is ten years old and retarded. He raises a bony finger to the sky, pointing directly at the meteor, clearly visible even in daylight.
"See that? Meteor. Sephiroth summoned that. It's set to hit Midgar in less than two days."
Vincent's eyes follow Godo's hand, up, up, into the sky where the deadly star blazes. A chill runs down his spine. "Yuffie is fighting the man who summoned that rock. The man who killed her mother. Alone?"
Godo clenches his teeth and shakes his head, old grief surfacing briefly in his eyes.
"Not alone," he says. "She's got a few friends. Odd ones, to be sure, and they were still a little annoyed at her when last I saw them, but they have an airship and a good set of weapons. They're headed to the Crater..."
Vincent shakes his head, and wonders whose materia Yuffie has her eyes set on now. His own are fixed still on the meteor.
He realises just how powerful Sephiroth must have grown, and just how little chance Yuffie, for all her brash words and honed ability, probably stands against him.
"Well," Godo says uncomfortably. And again, "Well."
Vincent turns to go, stomach roiling.
"I'll see you in three days."
- - - - - - - - - -
Vincent waits two days. When evening comes, he treks to the west coast; Meteor is so close it seems to work just as well as the sun. Its plummet towards the Planet seems oddly languid, as though it relishes every moment of the seething panic that is undoubted occurring in other settlements. He finds a ledge high above the ocean and sits with his latest find; a sizeable chunk of deep, bloody sandstone cut from the miniature cliffs that hem a curve of the tiny Leviathan offshoot that provides Vincent with water, named by Wutai 'Jormungand'. He chips away at it as the hours pass, eyes fixed upon the Meteor. He will carve the end of the world. And if Yuffie returns, she will have it for her seventeenth birthday.
It is nearly eight hours past noon (though the fire in the sky has lit this hemisphere in seemingly eternal twilight) when the Meteor suddenly seems to leap forward, bearing down on Midgar all those many miles across the ocean, hidden behind mountains of its own. Vincent drops his near-completed chunk of rock and shoots to his feet; he cannot help it. He strains to see all he can of Meteor's passage as it crashes to the ground, and all he can think is, Yuffie is dead. Surely, my Yuffie must be dead.
He has barely time to recognise the searing ache of hot tears down his cheeks before the ground beneath his feet begins to tremble and shake. The sea surges violently, and he is driven to his knees as the ledge he stands on judders in warning.
No, Vincent realises, one hand flat on the trembling earth. Not sea.
Ribbons of green light twine slowly from the ocean's surface, the trees on the mountain above him, the solid rock beneath his feet. Lifestream arcs into the sky, a slithering conflagration of green lines against a by turns dark and neon orange sky. Vincent turns slightly to watch, mouth only very slightly agape, as what seems like the whole of Leviathan seems to rise into the air, one solid mass of writhing green that squiggles and splurts all across the sky, all across the sky, across the glittering Lifestream-threaded ocean to Midgar, where...
The Meteor slows.
Almost imperceptibly, it slows, and for a moment Vincent believes he must have imagined it. But, no, it is grinding ever closer to a halt as each of those tiny, glittering strands draws towards Midgar, weaving together in an impassable barrier, a shimmering net of lives to be and already been, bearing the monstrous rock to the ground - ever - so - slowly-
The flash of light as the Meteor is evaporated nearly blinds Vincent, the red-cloaked man flinging up his claw as though shards of the thing will reach him all across the ocean. But when the shaking of the ground comes gently, forgivingly to a halt and he gains the courage to look and breathe again, the Meteor is gone.
Vincent stares at the deceptively peaceful night sky, watching a silver-flare like a shooting star pause to perform three loops over what he suspects is Midgar. Seeing it, Vincent feels a shout building in his chest, an elation that is almost too much to bear.
He kicks his sculpture off the shelf into the ocean, stares after it for a moment, as though he had not quite intended that to be the result of his euphoria, and turns for home. He's seen all he needs to. His Yuffie is alive.
- - - - - - - - - -
He sleeps well and deeply; so deeply he does not wake early as he usually does the following morning, even when a certain ninja comes bursting from the trees, yelling at the top of her lungs, "VINNIE! VINNIE, OH GREAT DA CHAO, VINNIE--!"
And, arriving on his doorstep, "Oh, gawd. It's gotta be narcolepsy."
He does not wake as she starts off at a quick dart across the room, then slows abruptly as she nears his sleeping form, taking in the startlingly soft expression on his face. She stands quietly reflective for a moment, crouches next to his pallet. A hand rises hesitantly, as though to smooth his messy hair back from his face.
She shakes her head.
Vincent jerks awake to a young, over-enthusiastic ninja shaking him by the shoulders. His eyes are red pinpoints for the split-second it takes him to identify Yuffie; the claw, already in the air, slows as it nears her shoulder. Yuffie doesn't seem to notice. She continues shaking him with one hand. The other clutches at a flat and shining pendant around her lovely neck.
"Look, look, look, Vinnie! I got it back! I got it - Leviathan's Scale!"
Vincent's slowly waking mind dredges up panicked memories of a falling star and a hazy vision of life and green. He sits up suddenly - Yuffie squeaks - and encircles her with his arms, tugging her sharply forward so that she is very nearly sitting in his lap. "I thought you must be dead," he tells her numbly. "For a few moments, I thought you were dead. If you ever go off so foolishly like that again, I will track you down and kill you myself."
Yuffie's mouth forms an 'O' of surprise, and then outrage. "Dad told you! That - that - UGH!" She crosses her arms and turns suddenly and viciously, though he holds her still. "It was gonna be my big story to tell you, and he spoiled it!"
Vincent's human hand finds its way to the crown of her head, petting it absently, as though she is still just a little girl. He has missed her very much. "Forgive your father, Yuffie. The appearance of the meteor concerned me. I demanded to know your whereabouts." Stubbornly, she remains turned-away, chin raised in defiance. Vincent's lips curve into a gentle, near-invisible smile. "He did not tell me very much. I would still like to hear about it."
Yuffie gives a great sigh, as though she's only doing this because he's very lucky and very special, and shifts a little away from his body heat. "You've still got stuff to do, doncha? Food to catch, wood to gather... I'll tell you on the way, 'kay?"
He agrees, though he would rather digest the information quietly. Even bragging about her recent achievements, Yuffie cannot sit still for more than three minutes at a time. As they make their way through the woods, gradually gathering and bundling their finds, she starts to tell the tale of the Great Ninja Yuffie and the Crisis from the Skies.
Her story begins in the middle of nowhere. Vincent finds that oddly fitting.
He listens, intrigued, as she speaks (in true Wutaian style) of a Man with the Hair of a Chocobo, born in Nibelheim, ("Man, that place makes history, huh?") of his Great and Noble Quest to become a SOLDIER, to impress his Secret Love, ("Who was SO not secret to anyone 'cept her. I swear, they're both dumb as rocks, sometimes.") of the Tragedies that Befell him-
She grinds slowly to a halt, there, and his attention to his fishing line (already waning) is broken completely. He glances up at her, curious, and finds her suddenly pensive. "Yuffie?"
"...we killed Hojo."
"..."
She fiddles with her hands, her eyes distant. "I'll... I'll get to that, I guess. I took the deathblow. You were... so angry with him. He did bad things to other people, but you came first, so I took the deathblow for you. I hope that's okay."
Vincent abandons his line completely; his fingers slacken as memory seethes. A soft and bitter smile comes to his lips. "I would have it no other way." Too cowardly to take his own vengeance, he had foisted it upon this girl - no, girl no longer. Not with all she's done.
Woman. The notion is strange and appealing.
Yuffie continues, describing the allies she has made. Vincent interrupts her description of Tifa Lockhart ("I have one word for ya, Vinnie: BOOBS.") to comment, "Your father mentioned they were somewhat vexed with you...?"
The ninja looks chagrined. "Yeah, well... I joined up with them for their materia first, didn't I? When we hit Wutai, I was the thiefiest thief who ever thieved, but they caught up with me." She grins slightly. "Saved my butt from this real creep, too -- but that's later, Vincent! Stop interrupting me!" This is delivered with a splash of water in the direction of his head that surely frightens away every sorry excuse for a meal that Jormungand has to offer. Vincent sighs, and wipes water from his eyes.
"Yes, Yuffie."
- - - - - - - - - -
She comes to him almost every day, for weeks on end, to make up for the time she has lost. It is an embarrassment of riches he hardly feels he deserves.
She claims she has nothing better to do until Cloud packages up all her materia and sends it to her. "Unless he doesn't give it to me within six months," she says thoughtfully. "Then I get to hunt him down, cut off his legs and hit him with them until either they break, or I get bored."
Vincent gives her an exasperated shake of his head, and what might be the slightest of smiles. Yuffie holds up her finger and waggles it at him playfully.
"Don't laugh, Vinnie! I wrote that part into the contract."
- - - - - - - - - -
On the first day of summer, Yuffie surprises him by wearing a dress. No, not a dress - a skirt, he corrects himself, and a vest thrown haphazardly over a bikini top that he hastily turns his eyes from, coughing discreetly. She is definitely a woman now, though she is still dwarfed by the backpack strapped to her slim shoulders.
Yuffie is flushed with the heat and exuberant as only she can be. She grabs him by the arm and begins to tug at his cloak, declaring, "It's way too hot for this, Vinnie. Get it off, get it off, we're going on a picnic."
Vincent blinks, and Yuffie takes advantage of the moment to duck inside his arms and wrestle with the buckles of his cloak. He stares at her dumbly as her nimble fingers make short work of the fastenings. The cloak falls into the dust at his feet. "We are?"
Yuffie's eyes shine. "Yup. I bet you never even saw the beaches down south, and they're the prettiest things; Leviathan weaves in and out of the open ocean all the way down to the southern tip." She laughs. "I have no idea how it does that! But it's still a great place to go for a swim."
"A... swim?"
With no small effort, she swings the backpack in his direction; he catches it one-handed and is surprised once again at its weight. He supposes he shouldn't be. Yuffie has always been far stronger than she appears.
"What are you, retarded?" She demands as he reluctantly shoulders the bag. "Yes, a swim. It's hot as Da Chao's belly out here, in case you haven't noticed!"
Vincent has not, really. He knows from the somewhat strained beat of his heart and the way he is sweating that it is uncomfortably warm, but as long as he keeps himself well hydrated, it does not seem to bother him very much.
He has the feeling that no matter his protests, he will be going, anyway. He decides to save himself the effort and frustration, and follow in her footsteps.
It takes them hours, Yuffie cheerfully slaughtering every fiend they come across, before they reach the first bridge. The ninja waltzes across it, cheerfully ignoring the squealing protest of the ropes. Vincent steps onto the thing with hesitance born of not wanting to plummet six hundred feet into the ocean below.
"Yuffie, you do realise that by the time we get back, we're going to be warmer than we started..."
Yuffie shrugs, turning and walking backwards along the bridge, feet unerringly finding the groaning boards despite her nonchalance. "We'll just swim 'til sundown and come back in the dark when it's cooler."
Vincent reflects for the rest of the trip that possibly every other woman in Wutai would have fallen trembling to her knees at the mere suggestion of being outside the village after dark, and that sure as Godo bemoans his fate as the father of such a girl, Michiko's pride in her daughter outshines every star in the sky.
- - - - - - - - - -
He is quite startled when, several weeks later, Yuffie runs into his clearing. She pauses for a moment, glances around as though she had not meant to run this way, and immediately dashes into the woods on the other side of the space. Once the dust from her passage has settled, there is no sign that she has even been there.
Vincent stares to the west after her and, some time later, hears vicious profanity and the effects of a powerful materia on dragons fifteen times Yuffie's size. He sets off after her, unarmed but for the two materia set on his rusting armlet, and some time later finds her blunting her shuriken with painful precision, beating it mercilessly against a large rock. The trees and ground around her bear signs of battle; dragons' blood is sprayed haphazardly along the ground. Vincent approaches uncertainly.
"Yuffie...?"
"Go away, Vincent!" She sounds as though she's trying to strangle herself with her tongue. He reflects that this must be especially difficult for her, since she cannot even curl it. "Just go -" CLANG. "- the hell -"
"Yuffie, what is wrong?"
She turns to him, eyes blazing. "What's wrong? I'll tell you what's wrong--" But it appears that she cannot, for she stops there and her shoulders heave, as though her fury exhausts her more than simple exercise ever could. He takes a step, he raises his hand, and she bats it down as though he held a knife.
"I'm getting married."
She blurts the words so fast and so harshly that they are a stabbing in his chest, a blast of cold air to his face. He stares at her and she stares at him and he opens his mouth and she punches him solidly in the stomach.
She flings her shuriken into the trees and bursts into tears when, infuriatingly, it comes back. She drops it point down and punches him again, while he is still gasping and struggling to breathe (he does not bother to defend against her; she will never really hurt him; he always wonders how he knows), and she buries her face against his chest and clutches at him tightly as her shoulders shake.
When he can breathe again, Vincent covers her shoulders with his claw, his hand in her hair, and he holds her gently until the trembling stops.
"This seems quite sudden," he comments, as though he does not much care.
Yuffie laughs, low and bitter, into his chest. "It isn't. I was never good with politics, but it's been going on for months right under my nose - Dad just didn't tell me, thought I'd run away, and now he's coming to stay and I don't want him, Vincent."
Gods above, can he really think of nothing to say to her?
"When?" He manages, and she sniffs loudly, decisively, and wipes her eyes. He comes to the realisation that there is mucus on his shirt, and decides that to grimace now would be insensitive and misplaced.
"He's arriving in three days. He's staying for two weeks. We're marrying in spring." She sniffs again, but her fingers loosen slightly as he continues his mechanical stroking of her head. "I bet he's a giant jerkface."
Vincent closes his eyes. "You have lived outside Wutai before, Yuffie. If you are truly so opposed..."
She gives this due consideration, and shakes her head reluctantly. "No, Vincent. I can't leave Wutai to fend for herself. And... the Great Ninja Yuffie doesn't run from anything." She declares more strongly. "Yeah. Just because I don't wanna... doesn't mean I can't." She looks up at him sheepishly. "I guess this must seem pretty silly to you."
Vincent smiles, that tiny, sad curving of lips paler than the undersides of her arms. "No, Yuffie. Not at all."
- - - - - - - - - -
"So?"
"So... he's not all bad," Yuffie is forced to admit, ducking her head. "He's even kinda cute, in an uptight-vassal kind of way. I'm glad he's gone for a while, though. I was so sick of talking about the weather, and craft..."
Vincent throws her an awkward sideways glance. "Your role in the Crisis from the Skies has hardly been thrown into obscurity. Surely you are able to bring more interesting topics of conversation to the fore? Not that flower arranging is anything other than fascinating, of course," he adds with a raised eyebrow. Yuffie muffles her laughter with her hands, then shakes her head.
"Well, it's different for me. The people... really are my people. They expect me to protect them. They celebrate my victory, of course, but it wasn't unexpected. I mean, it's not like they knew, it's just..."
Vincent tosses her the fish he has gutted and descaled, and starts work on another while she washes the remains from the more palatable flesh. "I understand."
Yuffie beams at him gratefully. "Anyway, it's hard to bring up sparring or far-off places in a manner befitting my station." She pronounces the words with distaste. "He doesn't want a Yuffie for a wife, y'know, he wants a wallflower, a pretty piece to hang from his arm. Like that's ever going to happen," she scoffs, and begins to wrap the fish in water weed.
Vincent eyes her carefully. "Yuffie," he begins, and pauses to rethink his words. She flicks water at him playfully.
"Just talk, dummy. You don't have to worry about anything, here."
Vincent throws her his second fish, gratified that she thinks so highly of his company, and washes the claw carefully and thoroughly in the swiftly-flowing Jormungand, swollen and satisfied with the recent rains. "Would you prefer to be his wife, and protect Wutai, or be yourself and leave her to stand alone?"
Yuffie cocks her head at him, sadness and pride shining in her eyes.
"You already know the answer to that, Vinnie."
He does, and he does not like it.
- - - - - - - - - -
And so she marries, and for a few months, she disappears entirely from his life once more.
Once or twice, while performing methodical maintenance on his gun, he seriously considers charging into Wutai and threatening the necessary parties until the city's safety and prosperity is assured, and Yuffie never even has to look at anyone she doesn't want to, let alone marry them. But he knows, in his heart of hearts, that although Yuffie might appreciate the final results, she would be angry with him for compromising her independence. And, although he rarely admits it to himself, the very last thing he wants is for Yuffie to be angry with him, no matter how foolishly or briefly.
It does not stop him from going out on afternoons when it is too late, should she arrive, for her to make it back to the village at an appropriate time, and killing fiends to pass the time. It does not stop the irrational, boiling flow of hatred through his limbs when he thinks of the faceless vassal to which his Yuffie has been traded off to, sold to, as though she were a - a prize Chocobo.
He twists the gold limb viciously through fiend-flesh, trying to sever the thoughts from his mind, but the violence behind his eyes will not be silenced.
- - - - - - - - - -
It is early one morning when he hears Yuffie's cursing through the trees, much improved (or perhaps worsened) by frequent contact with one Cid Highwind, the owner of the silver airship that has caused her so much grief over the years. He is not sure he approves of her language, though it is an interesting new development, and is more than ready to scold her when she breaks through the trees, heaving a small bundle of planks, with a bright blue tarpaulin slung about her neck and shoulders in a strange imitation of a cloak. When she spots him, she drops the wood, and lets out a satisfied sound as it clatters to the ground.
"Hey, Vincent, get over here and give me a hand!"
He gets over there, and gives her a hand; the only hand he has. She unwraps the tarpaulin, and lays it out flat on the ground, then gestures to it. "Drag the wood onto this half," she orders, sensibly. "I don't want it any wetter than it already is." She leaves him to carry out her orders, vanishing once more into the trees.
He does as she has requested, and by the time it is done she has reappeared, carrying a metal box and a large piece of paper folded like a concertina. She carries these over to her rock circle and sets them down, unfolding the paper and squinting at it determinedly. Vincent stares at the lines on the paper, the Midgarian lettering he can hardly remember how to read, and frowns.
"Yuffie... what is all this?"
She blinks at him, and then grins. "I'm building you a house," she tells him. "A proper one. With a real toilet, Vincent, for Leviathan's love."
He says, "You're what?" She waves a hand at him and makes a rude sound between her lips. He stares at her. "Yuffie. You cannot be serious."
She opens her toolbox and removes a large cloth sack. Painstakingly, she begins to gather up all the rocks she has collected over the years, prising them gently out of the earth, and placing them lovingly inside of her makeshift bag. "Sure I am," she tells him brightly, tucking a stray strand of hair behind her ear. "This thing's getting ready to fall down on top of you, Vincent." She shoots him a glance over her shoulder, and Vincent is taken-aback at the excitement simmering beneath the calm, grey surface of her eyes. "I'm going to be busy this year. Which means I won't be by to pull you out of the ruins, so I need to make sure there won't be any. Okay?"
Vincent is not the sort of be infected with enthusiasm, but Yuffie's determination will not allow him to simply sit by and watch. He helps her as she drags his few possessions into the light of day, and arranges a sort of lean-to that she tells him will stand up to anything. "Or at least, anything they get in Cosmo Canyon," she muses thoughtfully, taking the frame in her hands and rattling it experimentally. "Our weather's a lot worse than theirs. But this won't take until monsoon season, so it doesn't matter, right?"
Vincent nods, though dubiously, and watches as she strides around the ill-assembled hut that has lasted - with the help of frequent repairs - for more than thirty years, taking measurements and writing with brisk, completely illegible strokes down her arm. For all her preparations, she apparently forgot to bring a note pad.
They spend the afternoon that follows making marker pegs, and dying their tips red with berries and yellow with dust made from rocks. Vincent spreads the plans upon his knees, and is gratified to see that it will be a house little larger than his hut had been. There is a sink and a toilet, with notes beside their pipes indicating that they will run between the village and Jormungand, and room for a pallet and a real table.
"It's going to be on stilts, because it's gotta be gross to have to sleep in mud every time a typhoon comes through, Vincent," she tells him, "And you're going to have to do the waterproofing yourself, I think, but I'll leave you things for that - and the floorboards are coming pre-sealed--"
Vincent shakes his head at her, and traces his finger over lines that will one day be a ceiling. "Who taught you all this?" He marvels at the precise drawing, and Yuffie laughs.
"Reeve, of course!" She says, as though this should have been obvious. "He drew the plans. Cid's going to come in and give me a hand with the plumbing, too, because that's the last thing I want to screw up."
Vincent experiences a moment of heightened awareness - not fear, precisely, or even wariness, but intense knowledge that there will be people coming to his clearing, people that are not Yuffie. The knowledge makes him uncomfortable.
Yuffie seems to notice this, for she looks up from smearing their makeshift dyes into new wood, and reaches for his claw.
"Hey," she says, and he meets her eyes, brighter than steel. "If you really don't want them here, I won't let them come. Just tell me."
He ducks his head, and focuses instead upon the uneven red-purple lines that her fingers are tracing across the bronze back of his claw.
"No," he says. "It's fine."
If she trusts them, he thinks, then there is no reason that he should not trust them, also.
- - - - - - - - - -
Vincent wakes one morning to the less-than-melodious roar of a massive engine above his head, and rolls out of his lean-to with his hair in his eyes and the Scorpion readily at hand - only to watch blankly as a rope ladder unrolls itself to scrape the dusty ground, mere feet from him. He follows the wavering line of the ladder upward, to where it joins with the vast steel side of a great airship.
Yuffie waves at him from the deck, her expression bright, although her complexion seems a little greenish. Beside her stands an older man, dishwater blond and rough around the edges, and he swings himself down onto the ladder like he was born upon this airship.
Cid Highwind, Vincent decides, and tosses the Scorpion back onto his pallet. If he trusts Yuffie, he will not need it.
Highwind hits the ground firmly with both feet from the fifth rung up, and watches Yuffie descend with what is almost a father's eye. Vincent appreciates that Yuffie's friends look out for her where he cannot. When she takes Highwind's daring one step further, and jumps from the tenth rung, the blond man scowls at her.
"Watch what you're doin', kid. The last thing I need's your version of a Fat Chocobo." He raises his arm and waves to a deckhand, and the ladder is tugged slowly but surely upward, out of their sight. Vincent can only watch as Yuffie throws a punch that Cid catches as naturally as breathing, and the girl laughs, delighted, and grins widely at them both.
Vincent is unsure of the precise meaning of the vague, suffocating feeling he experiences, then. Perhaps it is something akin to jealousy, that Yuffie has friends, close friends, other than himself. Perhaps it is merely that vague, panicky feeling that has always overtaken him when he is forced to meet new people.
Yuffie flings her arms wide throws a hug in his direction with gleeful abandon; he catches her, and stares warily at Cid Highwind as the pilot observes with a strange combination of sourness and good nature.
"Vincent, this is Cid Highwind - the chain-smoking old jerk I told you about. That's his new miserable old bucket of bolts, the Sierra. And Cid, this is Vincent."
"Don't listen to a word she tells y'," Cid advises dryly, speaking lazily past his cigarette. "Sierra's fuckin' beautiful, and so was the Highwind."
Vincent feels some of that suffocating sensation begin to dissipate, and his hand ruffles Yuffie's hair almost automatically as she pulls away. "All with a grain of salt, Highwind-san." The name rolls strangely from his tongue, its syllables alien to those he is accustomed to speaking. Cid snorts.
"Don't start with that horse shit," he suggests mildly. "It's Cid."
"Yeah, Vinnie, don't go thinking he deserves any respect," Yuffie puts in brightly, and Cid blows smoke at her pointedly. She aims another punch, and this one impacts solidly with his bicep. "Don't," she hisses, and Cid ignores her fervour and shakes his head and turns around to regard their efforts at assembling a real house.
It is not bad, Vincent thinks, but it is not good, either. There is only so much that a short, slight woman and a man with one good arm can accomplish. A level ceiling was not one of them.
"I've gotta go take a look at this river, and where you want your pipes laid," Cid decides briskly. "But if we've got time, I'll give you a hand resettling that corner - otherwise you're gonna have a big hole there when the tiles arrive."
He turns to Yuffie and grins at her. "Shoulda known you'd build a house just as dizzy as you are."
Vincent decides, as Yuffie pokes out her tongue and pulls down her eyelid, and Cid smirks at her over his shoulder, that it might not be so hard to trust this man after all.
- - - - - - - - - -
Yuffie is sitting on his roof, sweating more profusely than the heat really warrants, and setting tiles into place as he passes them up to her. There is only one corner - the final corner - to go on this project. It has taken them nearly two months. Yuffie tells him it's harder, these days, to escape her duties and her arrangements, but she sets aside as many days for him as she possibly can, and he'd better be grateful if he knows what's good for him.
He does, of course, know. And he is, of course, grateful. But there is a change in Yuffie, lately - her legs and arms are rounder, and - although he berates himself for noticing this - her chest seems to have swelled. The light she has always carried inside herself seems to burn with the sweet, soft flame of a candle, now, rather than the all-eclipsing light of her own inner sun. It makes her features gentler, her cheeks colour quickly. She seems to be more beautiful than ever, and he cannot attribute it to anything other than her new husband.
The thought, for reasons he would rather not examine very closely, makes him feel cold and lonely again, although he does not begrudge Yuffie the happiness that Shinichiro is obviously bestowing upon her.
He notices more and more how empty his days seem, when she is not around.
But she is here, today. She is here, and demanding to know what it is he is thinking about, that she's asked, like, a gazillion times for the next tile, and he still hasn't passed it to her. He lifts it, and she grabs for it, and there is a strange, horrified expression in her eyes as, impossibly (she's a ninja she's a ninja how could it why would she), she loses her balance and he has to drop all the tiles to catch her with his arm.
She clings to him for a few breathless seconds, and he tortures himself with images of what could have happened had he not been paying attention, had he tried to catch her with the hand that was not a hand, at the mess of viscera he would even now be trying to replace - he didn't even know where his Restore materia was, right now--
She gives him a shaky laugh, and tells him she's gotta sit down for a little while and have a drink of water. She drains half the large clay jug she'd brought him, years and years ago, and then sits gasping for breath on his porch for a few minutes. She curls her legs up to her chest and breathes calmly for a while, and Vincent is surprised to see her fingers unflex and her hands slip slowly down to her ankles.
He wonders what is wrong with his Yuffie, that she falls asleep without warning in the middle of the day, and loses her balance when she leans too far out over the edge of his rapidly-forming roof.
- - - - - - - - - -
She wakes in the late afternoon and thrusts herself wildly to the edge of the porch to retch helplessly for a few seconds. Vincent has finished the roof by himself; he is by her side in an instant, concern evident even on his calm, cool features. But she waves him off, laughs at the worry in his eyes, and tells him that everything's fine, she just drank her water too fast.
Her eyes are honest and truthful to him, as they have always been, and he cannot help but believe her.
She spends the last hour of their afternoon carefully rearranging her rock garden on either side of his front step, and berates him when he tries to set a flat, white stone down beside a pointier, but still smooth, dark grey one.
"They don't like each other," she reminds him with a serious face. He does, if he puts his mind to it, recall a similar discussion held many years prior.
He sets them down, one on either side of the step, and Yuffie nods in satisfaction before returning to her own handful of interesting pebbles.
She kisses him on the cheek before she leaves, and when he dares show an expression of surprise, tells him it might be some time before she can come again. She has a lot to do. But she is very glad that she could finish his house, and he should enjoy his plumbing in the time being.
- - - - - - - - - -
He does enjoy his plumbing; he has always felt a vague sense of degradation as he wades through the brush to his latest latrine trench, though he knows this is silly. He does enjoy his plumbing.
But it is months before she comes to him again, and it is lonely in his little house in the middle of nowhere. The isolation of the place seems deeper, somehow, with the convention of a house to call his own.
Even the rocks seem strange and unfamiliar to him.
- - - - - - - - - -
(to be continued)
- - - - - - - - - -
A/N: I'm so glad this has been so well-received by everyone, since one of the claims most often used against this pairing is the age difference. Makes me happy to see you're all enjoying it, regardless. Thanks for the support.