100. Gone
She'd, no, they'd, always thought that he couldn't die. Wouldn't die. But now…
Yuffie stared at the grave site before her. Her eyes traced the characters on the front of the slab, with it's offerings of rice and incense and flowers. How could this…this cold stone be her husband's grave? How could this place be what he was reduced to, his love and his fire and his life? Ninety-five years in the world, thirty years by her side, two children, beautiful girls…
And now Vincent was dead, gone, whatever. Killed by a bullet, some crazed, obsessed kid who thought he'd show the world up for doing him wrong, like so many tried to.
Most people, read, those outside of AVALANCHE, believed Vincent to be about five years older than Yuffie. Her father was not among them, which had been a point of contention when he'd applied for the other man's permission to marry his daughter. So many people had lamented his death, because he was so young, that poor man, dead at fifty-five. Oh, and his widow got pity as well, more than she could handle. Still so young for such a tradgedy, and just after her father died as well. Her eldest daughter not even in the home, living a continent away, and her younger just seventeen, more of a burden than a comfort.
The people, especially the women, of Wutai pitied her all the more because she had no sons. But that didn't matter to Yuffie; it wasn't as though she wasn't going to take the throne anyway.
Two slim women in well matched white kimonos made their careful way to the kneeling woman by the graveside.
"Kaa-san?" Asana asked softly, kneeling by their mother's side and sliding an arm around her narrow shoulders.
Chiaki followed suit and knelt on Yuffie's other side, taking her chill hands and sighing, as all three women watched the grave.
After a while, other members of AVALANCHE began to approach Yuffie and her daughters, and their children came with them. Tifa, holding her husband's hand and looking as though she was about to cry, was one of the first to reach the grieving family.
"Yuffie," she chokes, and Yuffie doesn't respond immediately. Cloud catches up to her, and cuddles her into his shoulder, leading one of the many, many orphans by the hand. This one is a tiny girl, and she stares around with an air of discovery that breaks Yuffie's heart.
Vincent was not around much when Asana was that age, tiny and bright eyed. There had been an uprising, and he'd been called away to do WRO stuff there. He'd been exhausted when he was home and exhausted when he wasn't. Yuffie wasn't allowed into the field while Vincent was there; they barely saw each other, the only conversations whispered in the dark.
He was there for Chiaki. They were both still on missions, both still helping Godo run Wutai, since frankly the old man couldn't do it himself anymore. They were actually in Wutai at some point during her terrible twos, when she was rambunctious and hyper and basically exactly like her mother had been.
People say that curiosity killed the cat. It didn't kill this cat, just cut her up pretty badly.
Curiosity struck in the form of the Nara clan sword that sat on Yuffie and Vincent's shared family altar. He only followed the religion of Wutai half-heartedly, but as he wouldn't let himself wield his family's sword, the shrine seemed as good a place as any.
The long, high quality blade was set about a handswidth out of the saya at any time. Chiaki had been warned never to touch the thing, and Asana had been told to watch her.
Asana had thought she had rather better things to do.
The upshot of this was that Yuffie and Vincent heard a sharp scream and then the sound of a little girl crying. They'd run to her, panicking, and Yuffie had nearly passed out when she saw her little girl, covered in her own blood, a mother's worst nightmare. Her tiny baby hands lined with welling red, a similar slice on her leg. That night, long after Chiaki had been cleaned up and treated with Cure, Yuffie had sobbed herself ragged in her husband's understanding arms.
Tears well in her eyes now as she thinks about it, remembering the feel of him, arms she will never feel again. Understanding eyes, long, warm hands, those were the things he'd used, time and time again, to comfort her, to arouse her, to support her and occasionally restrain her. Hands clasp hers now, but they aren't Vincent's, and they never will be again. Yuffie feels the raised lines across the palms and fingers, marks that had inexplicably never faded from her daughter's hands, and there on that ground, in front of Vincent Valentine's grave, she has never felt colder, deader, more alone, than she does surrounded by the warmth and life and love of all her friends and family.
The gloomy sky catches her eye for a moment, as a bird circles across it, and then her eyes look down again, over the cliff and over the valley of her world. It would be so easy to throw herself off the edge and meet him again at the bottom, Yuffie thinks. In all her years, she has never been able to understand why death would appeal to anyone. Certainly there are fates she thinks would be worse—spending eternity trapped in Nero's darkness for one—but the allure of ending one's own life had never shown itself until now.
But Vincent wouldn't have wanted that, she reminds herself, as she slowly begins to realize her knees are aching from sitting on the stone and her throat is aching from tears, Vincent would have told her to keep going.
Yuffie sits and thinks about this, barely noticing her daughters' ministrations. It isn't that Vincent wouldn't forgive her weakness, it was that he would. That he would accept her shame and love all the more for it. It is the fact that her—Leviathan, she can't even think it—late husband is, was, so much the better person in their pair.
So she sits in front of the cold, dead stone that represents his cold, dead body and her cold, dead heart, an aching canker on the landscape, a hollow, because even though Yuffie Kisaragi might seem to go on, her soul is gone.