A Case of Mistaken Identity (or Vincent the whiteknight)
This got far fluffier than I'd anticipated in a weird form of self-soothing. It was meant to be a follow-up to At Sixes and Sevens. Note to self: You write better AGNST when you don't actually feel angsty. (takes warm bath, has nap)
"So you're going to wander the planet alone, dispensing justice?" Tifa's not taking a tone with him, just asking, but still he thinks she's taken his measure, and he's fallen short. "Stop in again, won't you, when you're passing." She tosses her hair out of her face as she gathers empties, fills a tray with them, and pauses with one hip holding the kitchen door open. "There's people here who'll miss you, it's the least you could do if you have to go wandering." She's teasing him, but her voice teeters on the edge between friendly and annoyed. Before he can reply she disappears into bright lights and dish-steam; he sees Cloud at the sink, head down, elbows working at scrubbing, before the door swings shut.
Vincent looks at his hands; he can see remnants of death etched into every line. A creature like him in a rowdy bar: he thinks of a film he saw as a boy, a vampire sweeping through a barroom like this one in a terrible, joyful frenzy, tearing heads from bodies, delighting in the kill.
"I hate drunk people." says a quiet voice from behind him. "I hate it here."
"Then why do you stay?" It's his reply to Tifa. Sometimes he thinks that every word he speaks is stolen from times when he didn't know what to say.
Behind them, a sudden roar of voices that makes her flinch. "The bellows of oxen," she says, when he raises an eyebrow at her. "Don't concern yourself."
"You're concerned," he says, without thinking. "Will you be safe?"
"Oh I'm fine." She waves one hand airily around her drink. "I could outrun ten of those assholes even if they were sober."
"But you're not-"
"Don't make me do a backflip indoors. It's not even late yet, I'll be fine."
He shrugs and stands up to leave, but she catches him by the arm. "Why do I stay?" He must look confused; she narrows her eyes. "I stay because it's easier than going. This is my family now. Tifa, Cloud and the WRO."
"And Wutai?" He regrets it the second it's said, as he watches her fold like wet silk.
"Not my Wutai. Their Wutai." He hopes desperately that she isn't crying; her face is buried in her palms. She takes a deep, shuddering breath and looks up at him. She's not, but her eyes are a little too bright. "Never told you, did I, what happened?"
He inclines his head. "I may not have been around."
"We're ships passing in the night," she says, with a wry look at his travelling gear. "Guess you got the taste for danger after Nibel, I remember a year or two ago you'd have thrown your phone in the trash and run away if Reeve even thought about calling you- anyway, you must have been away for the whole thing."
She seems to revert back to childhood, to the way she'd been before Meteorfall: her shoe hangs loose from one dangling foot, her socks wrinkled and falling down. She's found a piece of gum somewhere. The snap of it isn't too distracting, and he sits back down on the stool next to her and listens. What's half an hour against a thousand years?
"The courier showed up during happy hour, I was helping at the bar. It was a riot. This was part of the ritual, you know, if they'd just PHSed me it would have been a lot less humiliating all round. They know I'm shitty at reading my mail. But no, this dick in the full getup, sword made out of pot metal, you know-" he nods, "-turned up with a scroll and ended up handing it to the only Wutaian-looking chick in the bar he could see."
"They sent someone who didn't know what you looked like?" Vincent remembers Wutai as full of pomp and circumstance, thinks that Yuffie's nostalgic idea of a land unmarred by tourism is far wide of the mark, but he's beginning to see her point.
She snorts. "Get real, Vince, hardly anyone's seen me since I was thirteen, what with either that fat pervert or Lord Godo snatching me up whenever I tried to come back and help people. I could be a fucking quarterback for all this poor idiot knew." Vincent remembers his first trip to Wutai with Avalanche, the nudges and winks from the villagers when they asked about her, and thinks that maybe she's changed more than her country can handle.
"So anyway - I was in the kitchen washing glasses, so this all comes from Reno, who had a front row seat for the whole thing - coulda saved me from it if he weren't such an idle bonehead-" Vincent, from experience, thinks the Turks would have enjoyed the show. "-this guy stands in the doorway, dripping with rain, before traipsing over to some kid, some goddamn teenybopper whose grandparents probably never saw Wutai. Some yonsei who cracked up when she got this scroll dropped in her lap, and then the guy read it out to the whole bar right as I was coming out with a stack of clean dishes. Yuffie Kisaragi, the first of her name, is hereby stricken from the record of her line, is cast out from the pagoda of the five mighty gods, may none of Da Chao's people ever speak her name, lest their daughters' wombs be sown with salt and their sons be born with no eyes. And so on and so on, for ever." Yuffie does something with her face that doesn't quite amount to a smile. "Of course, I dropped the whole goddamn armful of plates and just stood there, the whole bar turned around to look at me, and that's when the guy realised, and he just walked out.
"So I'm still just standing there, Cloud came out and started sweeping up, you know how he is, and this kid starts trying to calm me down in the worst fucking Wutaian I have ever heard. Then Reno finally stepped in, got rid of em all by lining up shots on the bar till they were all too drunk to remember who I was. I was pretty good, I didn't freak, but I had to go away for a while, you know, clear my head. Guess that's why you and I kept missing each other, huh?"
Vincent sometimes thinks that his slyness, his underhandedness- his inner Turk- was cut out by Hojo and eaten. These days politics make him uncomfortable. "What happened, Yuffie?"
She sniffs and looks up. "Turns out Godo got married again, and his new wife popped out a son. Guess that's what I get for not reading his letters." Yuffie's hands ball into fists, one hovering uncomfortably by her mouth, which is quivering. "The gaijin-looking brat is no longer first in line, good for them, but he just had to make sure of it, the old bastard."
She's crying now, real tears; he doesn't know what to do, and it strikes him that this is a kind of pain he's never felt. He tries to comfort her. "He would have left you behind anyway, in the end. That's what life is."
Yuffie curls her lip. "Turk wisdom, huh. Figures." She gets up, swaying slightly. One of her shoes is unlaced. A few heads turn as she leaves, and Vincent thinks of all the things that can befall an unhappy, drunk woman.
In the edge of his vision he sees Tifa amongst a crowd waving their glasses at the bar; she catches his eye, but Vincent doesn't know if the slight shake of her head is for what he's done already, or for what he's about to do.
He doesn't try to walk Yuffie home, but he knows that the uncomfortable feeling settled low in his throat won't go away until he's seen for himself that she's safe. So he shadows her instead; he's not armed for bodyguarding, but instead dressed for passing by unnoticed, for silence and quick movement, because when Vincent works for the WRO, he works by night.
He's seen this picture so many times before, from rooftops and catwalks and gazing from windows in hot, still nights. It's like a storyboard to a bad film: it starts with a woman alone, walking quickly and unsteadily with shaking shoulders and always long, long bare legs. Though he hides and watches in darkness, he's no hero, no saviour: he carries so many sins that another omission means nothing, and there are so many times he's turned his head to the wall and waited out the ending.
They come out from doorways and alleyways and every way to watch at night, these men, who never seem to be doing anything but are always watching with heavy, unhurried eyes. Some of them drive slowly, elbows resting on the ledges of their rolled-down windows, passing by with a long, low, mean whistle. Some of them idle on stoops, flashing a sweat-stained armpit as they lift bottles to their mouths, licking their lips slowly, making eye contact. Always watching.
Vincent knows she sees it. Sooner or later, every woman that moves to the city dons that beaten-on armour, that thin, brittle layer between themselves and the world, that says with every movement don't fuck with me. Yuffie had it sooner than most, had it when he met her, a woman of the world at sixteen, yet since last they met she's angrier, more desperate. Strange, he thinks, that he is disappointed.
She disappears between a diner and a parked-up truck and doesn't emerge. The angle's wrong, so he drops down two storeys and approaches from behind. Yuffie's not in the diner, and he doesn't know where she lives. Behind him, a stifled shout, but when he flicks his eyes back, no one's there. Vincent takes to the rooftops again in a sudden panic. She hasn't doubled back, and onward is a flat mean mess of strip malls and gas stations.
He swings around a fire escape and a flash in an alleyway catches his eye. She had been wearing white; vest, denim shorts, long socks. The shape stoops low into the light seeping in from the street and resolves itself into Yuffie. Vincent has the sudden, bizarre thought that she is in mourning. Her hand is outstretched to a little cat, as dark as she is bright; she's feeding it something from her pockets.
((()))
Yuffie fumbles with the lock and then turns around in the open doorway, folding her arms. "You can come down now, Vincent," she says flatly. He takes a hesitant step forward toward the edge of the roof. He'd been very quiet, and she hadn't looked up once. "I'm safe." He drops down with one hand behind her.
"You know I can hold my own, asshole." Yuffie shoulders past him; he offers no resistance. "But you followed me anyway."
"Yes," he says.
"I don't need-" she spits the words out in between flicking light switches, shedding little knives, whirling like a fury "-a fucking protector, I am not-" she punctuates every word with a slam of her heel against the wall to loosen her boots- "a fucking princess." She flings the boots across the room and stalks back up into the doorway, into his face. "I need a friend, and you still don't know how that works, Vince, so get out." There's a long scrape across one of her knees where she'd done a forward roll through the tall guy's legs. He watches the blood rise in beads and fall, drop by drop, into the carpet.
Vincent says, "I'm still learning."
((()))
He feels her shift. She's not asleep, after all, though her voice is slow and heavy. "He had to do it like that, you know. Couldn't leave any doubt." She yawns. "I don't hate him, it just hurts." Vincent doesn't say anything. She's quiet for a long time, but eventually she turns over and looks up at him. "Does it always hurt like this, being free? When you didn't know you were trapped in the first place?"
He closes his eyes and leans his head back against the pillow. "Go to sleep, Yuffie."
He stops at Seventh Heaven early in the morning on his way out of town. Tifa hasn't gone to bed; she's still hauling crates of empties out to the recycling. She doesn't seem surprised to see him, just hands him two crates the next time she goes back inside. When they're done, she fixes him with a stare. He turns away and tells her, "I leave because it's easier than staying." Outside Yuffie's apartment building there had been a black cat sitting as still as a statue, waiting for something. It hadn't been him.
"So you're going to wander the planet alone, dispensing justice?" Tifa's not taking a tone with him, just asking, but still he thinks she's taken his measure, and he's fallen short. "Stop in again, won't you, when you're passing." She tosses her hair out of her face as she gathers empties, fills a tray with them, and pauses with one hip holding the kitchen door open. "There's people here who'll miss you, it's the least you could do if you have to go wandering." She's teasing him, but her voice teeters on the edge between friendly and annoyed. Before he can reply she disappears into bright lights and dish-steam; he sees Cloud at the sink, head down, elbows working at scrubbing, before the door swings shut.
Vincent looks at his hands; he can see remnants of death etched into every line. A creature like him in a rowdy bar: he thinks of a film he saw as a boy, a vampire sweeping through a barroom like this one in a terrible, joyful frenzy, tearing heads from bodies, delighting in the kill.
"I hate drunk people." says a quiet voice from behind him. "I hate it here."
"Then why do you stay?" It's his reply to Tifa. Sometimes he thinks that every word he speaks is stolen from times when he didn't know what to say.
Behind them, a sudden roar of voices that makes her flinch. "The bellows of oxen," she says, when he raises an eyebrow at her. "Don't concern yourself."
"You're concerned," he says, without thinking. "Will you be safe?"
"Oh I'm fine." She waves one hand airily around her drink. "I could outrun ten of those assholes even if they were sober."
"But you're not-"
"Don't make me do a backflip indoors. It's not even late yet, I'll be fine."
He shrugs and stands up to leave, but she catches him by the arm. "Why do I stay?" He must look confused; she narrows her eyes. "I stay because it's easier than going. This is my family now. Tifa, Cloud and the WRO."
"And Wutai?" He regrets it the second it's said, as he watches her fold like wet silk.
"Not my Wutai. Their Wutai." He hopes desperately that she isn't crying; her face is buried in her palms. She takes a deep, shuddering breath and looks up at him. She's not, but her eyes are a little too bright. "Never told you, did I, what happened?"
He inclines his head. "I may not have been around."
"We're ships passing in the night," she says, with a wry look at his travelling gear. "Guess you got the taste for danger after Nibel, I remember a year or two ago you'd have thrown your phone in the trash and run away if Reeve even thought about calling you- anyway, you must have been away for the whole thing."
She seems to revert back to childhood, to the way she'd been before Meteorfall: her shoe hangs loose from one dangling foot, her socks wrinkled and falling down. She's found a piece of gum somewhere. The snap of it isn't too distracting, and he sits back down on the stool next to her and listens. What's half an hour against a thousand years?
"The courier showed up during happy hour, I was helping at the bar. It was a riot. This was part of the ritual, you know, if they'd just PHSed me it would have been a lot less humiliating all round. They know I'm shitty at reading my mail. But no, this dick in the full getup, sword made out of pot metal, you know-" he nods, "-turned up with a scroll and ended up handing it to the only Wutaian-looking chick in the bar he could see."
"They sent someone who didn't know what you looked like?" Vincent remembers Wutai as full of pomp and circumstance, thinks that Yuffie's nostalgic idea of a land unmarred by tourism is far wide of the mark, but he's beginning to see her point.
She snorts. "Get real, Vince, hardly anyone's seen me since I was thirteen, what with either that fat pervert or Lord Godo snatching me up whenever I tried to come back and help people. I could be a fucking quarterback for all this poor idiot knew." Vincent remembers his first trip to Wutai with Avalanche, the nudges and winks from the villagers when they asked about her, and thinks that maybe she's changed more than her country can handle.
"So anyway - I was in the kitchen washing glasses, so this all comes from Reno, who had a front row seat for the whole thing - coulda saved me from it if he weren't such an idle bonehead-" Vincent, from experience, thinks the Turks would have enjoyed the show. "-this guy stands in the doorway, dripping with rain, before traipsing over to some kid, some goddamn teenybopper whose grandparents probably never saw Wutai. Some yonsei who cracked up when she got this scroll dropped in her lap, and then the guy read it out to the whole bar right as I was coming out with a stack of clean dishes. Yuffie Kisaragi, the first of her name, is hereby stricken from the record of her line, is cast out from the pagoda of the five mighty gods, may none of Da Chao's people ever speak her name, lest their daughters' wombs be sown with salt and their sons be born with no eyes. And so on and so on, for ever." Yuffie does something with her face that doesn't quite amount to a smile. "Of course, I dropped the whole goddamn armful of plates and just stood there, the whole bar turned around to look at me, and that's when the guy realised, and he just walked out.
"So I'm still just standing there, Cloud came out and started sweeping up, you know how he is, and this kid starts trying to calm me down in the worst fucking Wutaian I have ever heard. Then Reno finally stepped in, got rid of em all by lining up shots on the bar till they were all too drunk to remember who I was. I was pretty good, I didn't freak, but I had to go away for a while, you know, clear my head. Guess that's why you and I kept missing each other, huh?"
Vincent sometimes thinks that his slyness, his underhandedness- his inner Turk- was cut out by Hojo and eaten. These days politics make him uncomfortable. "What happened, Yuffie?"
She sniffs and looks up. "Turns out Godo got married again, and his new wife popped out a son. Guess that's what I get for not reading his letters." Yuffie's hands ball into fists, one hovering uncomfortably by her mouth, which is quivering. "The gaijin-looking brat is no longer first in line, good for them, but he just had to make sure of it, the old bastard."
She's crying now, real tears; he doesn't know what to do, and it strikes him that this is a kind of pain he's never felt. He tries to comfort her. "He would have left you behind anyway, in the end. That's what life is."
Yuffie curls her lip. "Turk wisdom, huh. Figures." She gets up, swaying slightly. One of her shoes is unlaced. A few heads turn as she leaves, and Vincent thinks of all the things that can befall an unhappy, drunk woman.
In the edge of his vision he sees Tifa amongst a crowd waving their glasses at the bar; she catches his eye, but Vincent doesn't know if the slight shake of her head is for what he's done already, or for what he's about to do.
He doesn't try to walk Yuffie home, but he knows that the uncomfortable feeling settled low in his throat won't go away until he's seen for himself that she's safe. So he shadows her instead; he's not armed for bodyguarding, but instead dressed for passing by unnoticed, for silence and quick movement, because when Vincent works for the WRO, he works by night.
He's seen this picture so many times before, from rooftops and catwalks and gazing from windows in hot, still nights. It's like a storyboard to a bad film: it starts with a woman alone, walking quickly and unsteadily with shaking shoulders and always long, long bare legs. Though he hides and watches in darkness, he's no hero, no saviour: he carries so many sins that another omission means nothing, and there are so many times he's turned his head to the wall and waited out the ending.
They come out from doorways and alleyways and every way to watch at night, these men, who never seem to be doing anything but are always watching with heavy, unhurried eyes. Some of them drive slowly, elbows resting on the ledges of their rolled-down windows, passing by with a long, low, mean whistle. Some of them idle on stoops, flashing a sweat-stained armpit as they lift bottles to their mouths, licking their lips slowly, making eye contact. Always watching.
Vincent knows she sees it. Sooner or later, every woman that moves to the city dons that beaten-on armour, that thin, brittle layer between themselves and the world, that says with every movement don't fuck with me. Yuffie had it sooner than most, had it when he met her, a woman of the world at sixteen, yet since last they met she's angrier, more desperate. Strange, he thinks, that he is disappointed.
She disappears between a diner and a parked-up truck and doesn't emerge. The angle's wrong, so he drops down two storeys and approaches from behind. Yuffie's not in the diner, and he doesn't know where she lives. Behind him, a stifled shout, but when he flicks his eyes back, no one's there. Vincent takes to the rooftops again in a sudden panic. She hasn't doubled back, and onward is a flat mean mess of strip malls and gas stations.
He swings around a fire escape and a flash in an alleyway catches his eye. She had been wearing white; vest, denim shorts, long socks. The shape stoops low into the light seeping in from the street and resolves itself into Yuffie. Vincent has the sudden, bizarre thought that she is in mourning. Her hand is outstretched to a little cat, as dark as she is bright; she's feeding it something from her pockets.
((()))
Yuffie fumbles with the lock and then turns around in the open doorway, folding her arms. "You can come down now, Vincent," she says flatly. He takes a hesitant step forward toward the edge of the roof. He'd been very quiet, and she hadn't looked up once. "I'm safe." He drops down with one hand behind her.
"You know I can hold my own, asshole." Yuffie shoulders past him; he offers no resistance. "But you followed me anyway."
"Yes," he says.
"I don't need-" she spits the words out in between flicking light switches, shedding little knives, whirling like a fury "-a fucking protector, I am not-" she punctuates every word with a slam of her heel against the wall to loosen her boots- "a fucking princess." She flings the boots across the room and stalks back up into the doorway, into his face. "I need a friend, and you still don't know how that works, Vince, so get out." There's a long scrape across one of her knees where she'd done a forward roll through the tall guy's legs. He watches the blood rise in beads and fall, drop by drop, into the carpet.
Vincent says, "I'm still learning."
((()))
He feels her shift. She's not asleep, after all, though her voice is slow and heavy. "He had to do it like that, you know. Couldn't leave any doubt." She yawns. "I don't hate him, it just hurts." Vincent doesn't say anything. She's quiet for a long time, but eventually she turns over and looks up at him. "Does it always hurt like this, being free? When you didn't know you were trapped in the first place?"
He closes his eyes and leans his head back against the pillow. "Go to sleep, Yuffie."
He stops at Seventh Heaven early in the morning on his way out of town. Tifa hasn't gone to bed; she's still hauling crates of empties out to the recycling. She doesn't seem surprised to see him, just hands him two crates the next time she goes back inside. When they're done, she fixes him with a stare. He turns away and tells her, "I leave because it's easier than staying." Outside Yuffie's apartment building there had been a black cat sitting as still as a statue, waiting for something. It hadn't been him.