Oneshot - Roots
Title: Roots
Setting: FF7 - original
Rating: T
Summary: Because Vincent forgets himself, sometimes, because Vincent wants to swallow her whole and crawl into her skin, and these are the ties that last.
Useless A/N: I wanted to write something a little more upbeat, in a very non-upbeat way. Does that make sense? I began writing this to Rusted Roots' Send Me on My Way, which will always be my favorite song forever and ever and ever amen, and it branched off from there to something a little different that I wasn't expecting. Thoughts, concrit, put-downs, comments, not-comments? :D Nyuk nyuk nyuk.
Roots
“It’s always the little things, isn’t it?”
She is crouching at the base of the tree like a squirrel, unmoving and altogether silent, outside of the tent in the cool air of early morning with the moon silent like the hiding sun and the sky bleeding blue, clear like the summer pond he filled up his flask with yesterday. This is the first thing she has said to him.
Vincent looks at Yuffie.
“…What do you mean?”
But he thinks that he knows what she means. Very well, actually, and for her picking up on that is mildly frightening for him. Vincent is not one to fear other people. He is surprised that she is not intimidated by him, like the others are.
“Nevermind. Go back to sleep, ducky.”
Vincent is genuinely befuddled for the first time in many, many years - years, years turned to decades, isn’t that right - and his mind protests such a rather demeaning nickname, but his open eyes find her, and he is again surprised to find that she is not unmoving and silent at all. She is quivering with the promise of motion, and her mouth is trembling from anticipation to form a sound like a writhing newborn, naked and unsure and full of life.
She is smiling at him. Cheekily, very much a teenager. A child.
He looks again and she is alive and much, much older.
(He blinks and forgets what he saw.)
It is early in the morning with the moon still like she would never be, and she is something radically new and something that he finds himself wanting to swallow whole. Vincent has forgotten himself and doesn’t even know it in his dazed state; his eyes drift shut to the sight of her creeping towards the butterfly that beats its wings slowly, before pouncing and laughing openly as it escapes her with those wings that still flap, unwavering forever in a steady rhythm.
-
Between Vincent, Red XIII, and Yuffie, there is a common understanding; Vincent does not care, much, but he is… relieved, relieved that they are a group.
All very much different in their own ways.
He doesn’t think any of them handle people well.
When he tries to stop thinking - thinking - (restsleepstaygowaitpleasewhyloveyouhateyouBANG) - thinking, when he stops trying when he tries stopping which he shouldn’t, but does sometimes because he’s incredibly weak, Vincent notices that Nanaki seems uncomfortable in towns, unsure and unlike the beast (not unlike Vincent, who still sometimes reaches with his claw or wants to ruffle his hair and can’t keep his eyes off the ground in crowds). Yuffie is guarded around strangers, which doesn’t make sense until Vincent realizes that she does this exactly by being open.
“…There is a lake, perhaps thirty meters or so east,” Nanaki informs them suddenly, flicking his tail as he does so. Sparks fall away, sizzling and dying before hitting the ground.
“I regret to say it, but our chances of encountering monsters that could otherwise be avoided are heightened largely by the scent of both of you. Your clothing is beginning to smell rank.”
“Heeey, whadabout you, huh? You smell pretty funky, too, don’t single US out!”
“I smell like an animal,” the beast answers. “Common. My scent is no different from a wolf, currently. If I bathed I would smell like my own species, which would also attract predators. You both reek of sweat and dirt that… is not common among most animal species.”
They go to the lake.
They also end up sleeping there, next to the water that is deathly still as the moon reflects from it mournfully.
Vincent stands and watches it for a long, long time before turning his head. (For some reason, he can’t turn completely away.)
He watches his sleeping companions.
Yuffie is sleeping against Nanaki, curled against his side. They breathe together, and they are very comfortable with each other. Perhaps it is the fact that they are both so young. Or that they were the only real outcasts before Vincent joined the group.
Yuffie looks younger, like this. She looks like a child, and Vincent watches her small fist curl a little tighter around the rich colored red fur. Sleeping. Easy in, easy out.
She is a child, only a child, and Vincent’s human hand flexes in a short twitch. He could break her neck. Save her, from things that he’s seen and done, because this is a dangerous road that they’re all traveling on. Vincent has already gone down it. Maybe more times than he can count.
He could snap her neck in half cleanly, efficiently, rearrange it to look like she had died of poison. In her sleep, never knowing. Save that innocence she will one day mourn the loss of.
His stomach clenches painfully and Vincent’s eyes sting. She is the most lively of the bunch.
Yuffie’s eyes open blearily.
And he wonders how he could think her a child at all.
“Get over here, vampy,” she calls out, and makes him sit against the other side of Nanaki. “…Makin’ me feel bad. Ain’t got nothin’ but dirt-shit, damn straight, left our stupid bags with the others ‘cuz Tifa was feelin’ real sick. I feel like Cid.” She rambles, now, and Vincent feels like retching for thinking. Add another sin to the list, and this one was all his own and he’s getting worse. And he doesn’t know what that means, but his skin crawls and his left hand pulses and throbs and he thinks of rotting flesh.
“Hey-hey, if I puked I bet it’d come up tar. All that crap smokers inhale… like the sakura petals in spring, crush’m up and spread ‘em out good, goodnight forever and always… miss miss miss them all, yunno, back to Leviathan flowing back into god back and he saves his children ‘n I’ll kill Rufus next time I see him… worst babysitter ever, shoulda kicked ‘im real good when I had the chance…”
She doesn’t seem to be speaking to him. Yuffie falls asleep again.
Vincent feels warmer despite the cool night breeze. The moon sits off on his left, and he falls asleep facing the stars straight above.
-
A different place, a different time and Vincent douses the fire to the cool twilight air as the others pull up their sleeping bags and he will take watch. It’s been a long day, a long day, and he’s unsure and silent and wants to curl up in his own secondhand bag that is bright yellow, courtesy of one ninja until they can get him his own. Long day - long day, long decade long life, and he is so incredibly tired and just wants to curl up like the little boy he isn’t in the yellow secondhand sleeping bag and never get up again.
(He doesn’t admit this feeling to himself.)
These people are very close, he thinks. The sky is clear enough that they all mutually decide it a waste to pull out the tents, and Vincent sees why with an upturned chin to look up.
The sky is clear like a marble as twilight sets in.
(I wish I were the sky, he thinks. And then he feels minutely ridiculous and tries to look away.)
Aeris says a soft goodnight that echoes, magnified, through the emptiness of their camping space at the edge of an open meadow, green and every blade swaying in the quiet breeze. There is a murmured reply of the same from the others.
Vincent sits against a tree. He will take watch tonight.
He can’t help looking at the sky.
And he can’t stop. His eyes won’t look away, and it’s vaguely alarming in a very slow, mellow sense of the word.
Vincent finally tears his eyes from the expanse above them all. (It is almost painful.) He watches his companions for a moment.
Yuffie is not among their number. He looks up again, as high as his neck tilts his head back, and her leg is swinging tiredly against the base of the tree she leans against as well, from her spot on a thick, mellow wood branch.
“Take your sleeping bag.”
She twists her body in a way that makes him wonder if she will fall. She doesn’t, and instead is leaning where she sees him as her hair, short and boyish, is falling around her face, towards the ground.
“I’m taking over your watch at half-night,” is the reply, in a rather bouncy sort of voice. She has an accent, he notices. Slight. Very slight, but it slips through every so often. (Like his.) Nice to listen to. “Save myself the trouble, anyway. Sides, ‘s safer up here.”
“…Safer?”
“Monsters,” she replies immediately, yawning loud and fake. “Attracted to big groups. I’ll use my own once we all split up again. I’ve been sleeping in trees all my life, Dr. Depress-o. One more night shouldn’t kill me.”
She seems content to leave it at that.
Vincent looks up. Her foot still swings, steady on its own beat.
There is silence, for a moment, with only the wind against the trees and the grass, and the crickets and distant wildlife.
“Is it?” he finds himself whispering.
There is shuffling as she flips around on the tree, arms and legs hanging limply, her face above his own. It is young. Younger than he looked, at sixteen.
She opens her eyes. Old. Older than he looked, at sixteen.
“Does thirty years of bed-hair give lice?”
He doesn’t reply, and only watches her, her with her eyes closed and a childish face and then she says, “thought so,” and then doesn’t say anything after that.
Four hours later, when the moon is pouring cool air and white from her shining face Vincent stands.
“Yuffie,” he says. She vaults down, surprisingly limber and landing on her feet, wide-awake. She slides wordlessly down to sit in the place he was just occupying.
“…It is,” she confirms quietly later, much later when he is inside the beat-up bright yellow sleeping bag.
Yuffie is very much the same as him. Very much alone around people. Unable to connect. Never really understanding them.
But Yuffie pretends to, he thinks.
She is an old woman waiting to drown, she is a young child flailing in the ocean.
“I want to set the sky on fire,” she tells him unexpectedly. The words echo through the sky that is forever blue, and he falls asleep to the comforting words.
-
It is morning, and they sit together.
This is how the groupings fell, and they seem to stick together. They are both outcasts in their own rights.
She doesn’t seem very comfortable around people. But she smiles, mostly, cheeky and childish when her eyes aren’t old, jumpy and unable to sit still.
“I dunno how to act around people,” she announces to him, sounding like she wants to know tomorrow’s weather. Yuffie sits across from him; they are in a restaurant, connecting to the inn, sitting in a small wooden booth that is the color of bright oak. A window that takes up the entire expanse of wall lets in midmorning sunlight. Yuffie faces away from it, booth feet drawn away from the floor and a sugar packet in one hand, a bright red apple in the other. She fiddles with both. He’s found that she tends to do this, no matter how she feels or acts or what she says.
“You… pretend you do,” he tells her.
The sun flows into his eyes, her small form the only block. It goes over the top of her head. Yuffie looks like a child, Yuffie looks like an old woman.
Vincent blinks, and Yuffie looks like Yuffie.
“But I don’t. I am selfish,” she states this matter-of-factly. “I was on my own for so long that I forgot. I prob’ly even forgot all of the stupid lessons I had to learn. They were torture. Except rope-escape classes. I am now an advocate of believing you cannot have too many rope-escape classes. But the other ones sucked. Like tea ceremonies. I hated those,” she is saying conversationally as she dumps the whole sugar package into her mouth.
He never knows quite what to say to her.
“I… don’t know very much about people. We are similar in that respect.” He is not trying to sympathize. Vincent does not sympathize, empathize, comfort. (He was in the Turks of his own accord.)
This brings him back to reality.
Many things he has been hiding behind his eyelids burst forward.
“We crazies have to stick together,” Yuffie is telling him absently as she focuses on the apple that she rolls down her shoulder to flick off of her wrist and catch.
He doesn’t reply.
A dog barks happily in the background and goes running to splash through the slowly vanishing puddles across the street, through the window, a blur of gold across the cobblestone. A boy trails after it, a smile so wide it could crack a star clean in two.
-
They are in their lonely threesome again, looking for their Aeris.
Vincent doesn’t know when she became theirs, but there it is - they’re all a sort of family now, though he hesitates on the thought, on the word, they’re all a sort of family now and if Vincent is honest with himself (something he finds he isn’t often, which is a little surprising, though not shocking, in of itself) they all seem to hold bits and pieces of each other together.
The Northern Continent is truly a sight. The temperature leaves their breath white, and the clouds swirl above to hide the sun, while the air is clean and the rivers are so cold they make his teeth ache bitter-sweetly. They walk along one.
“Red, d’you pick anything up?” Yuffie kicks a rock absently.
She’s worried. Genuinely worried, and she hides it but her eyes are old and her ears prick every so often for a sound that Vincent knows she is hoping to be a giggle, a fumble, a song.
“…This is not the direction she would have gone,” Nanaki replies evenly after a moment. “Aeris’ scent isn’t even close. Cloud sent us in this direction, but I have the feeling we should turn back.”
They all share one glance. And they each understand each other, to an extent, because they are a sort of family.
Vincent is not surprised when they all turn around at the same moment to retrace their steps, Red leading the way. Yuffie and Vincent follow, and the set pace is fast. They care about their Aeris. Vincent also cares about Aeris - she was respectful to him, until they talked. And then he became another AVALANCHE-er, to Aeris, and that was something, and it was unexpected, and she reminds him of his mother that he barely remembers and doesn’t think on very often.
“Shi-“ Yuffie fumbles and pulls out her phone. “Spikes? Wh- okay. K. Yeah, we’re actually on our way back now. Bye.”
They go to Bone Village, rock and dust and snow, and as a family - a sort of screwed up, dysfunctional but very real family, and the thought leaves Vincent with a sort of shiver that is warm and cold - they trek through the forest and Vincent feels it, and it is very real and makes him want to sit, for a while, or for maybe much longer and the mako in his blood pulses in beat with the planet beneath him.
They walk into the most beautiful city Vincent thinks he’s ever seen. Into a house, with a lake outside that feels so calm - steps, spiraling down -
And Aeris-
Their Aeris-
Her eyes are open when the long blade elegantly slides through her belly, sweet and slow like a waltz as she sags like a porcelain doll, her hair unraveling softly and the marble from its place atop her crown falling with honey sounded chinks off of the stone into the water on a beat all its own.
The last time Vincent sees Aeris, she is quietly sinking. (Her lips are still smiling.)
Yuffie cries hard.
Vincent sees her sitting limply, at first, and Red XIII wanders towards her aimlessly, curling up with his head buried in her lap while she strokes his fur with her slim fingers shivering.
It is only later when she does let it out. It’s been a long hour long day long week, and they are all so very, very tired and Vincent feels it, too, cold like slippery ice in a bucket to swallow up like fire.
Yuffie is outside, and she is pouring tears and loneliness and unhappiness out her eyes and nose and mouth and ears, flooding and his brain is empty and his hand throbs and his legs are numb and when he walks out the inn door into the snow, the screen door clacking shut behind him, she turns and for one immeasurable second watches him with soaking hair and clothes and frosty lashes and lips and then barrels all ninety-something pounds of herself into his chest, pounding her tiny fists curled up tight into balls into his chest again and again, in one mass of runny-nosed, red-faced crying screaming Yuffie.
He waits, waits and waits and when she tires and collapses and just cries, just crying salt and water in great big plops to land on his shirt, he patiently picks her up like a young child, like a sick elder, and holds her quietly, rocking her gently, watching the snow and wondering what happened before going inside to fall asleep in a chair, with her curled up like a wet cat on his lap, with her making him feel like a little boy wanting to crawl into her skin and never come out, listening to the sound of her soft breathing.
-
“It’s a different perspective, from here,” and her voice is easy and clear.
Yuffie is much different around him, from the others.
They are both outcasts in their own right. And they identify with each other, to a point. And it is this common bond that sets them together as he is on the grass of the open field with Yuffie, spread out like feathers, soft and easy and everything good in the world to watch the marble-clear blue sky.
Something big is coming. And they both know it; the word meteor bounces around inside his skull like a stream, trickling and easy. It is very easy to stop thinking.
And for once, Vincent lets him forget himself. Because he is weak and useless and tired, and she makes him think he needs this. So he does forget himself, and is relaxed and unworried while the planet seeps himself away into the good earth.
The dying afternoon sun is casting shadows, over the blue blanket that stretches out before them, but it is overpowered by summer streaks that hit his eyes, smiling and casual and it doesn’t bother him in the slightest. Deep breaths leave him in awe of this world.
“It is the small things,” and his voice floats upwards and echoes in the vast expanse of blue bleeding pink and yellow and orange.
“…I told you that to get something through your thick brain-skull-thingy, and you’re just getting it now?”
He hears the smile in Yuffie’s voice. It sounds very old and very young, and he decides that it is just Yuffie, who is timeless and unsure and livelier than Leviathan himself in the water, Yuffie who laughs open and free and the wind carries her voice.
Tomorrow, they will awaken and she will once again be bearing the emotions of the group, she will once again flit between that young girl and that old woman, and he will remember himself and his shoulders will be weighed again, again just as always, and they will have things to do and miles to go and oceans to cross. Tomorrow brings dirt and darkness and loneliness, he knows.
Vincent feels like the precious child-woman beside him and doesn’t think about that right now.
Somewhere near here, he hears children laughing.
Setting: FF7 - original
Rating: T
Summary: Because Vincent forgets himself, sometimes, because Vincent wants to swallow her whole and crawl into her skin, and these are the ties that last.
Useless A/N: I wanted to write something a little more upbeat, in a very non-upbeat way. Does that make sense? I began writing this to Rusted Roots' Send Me on My Way, which will always be my favorite song forever and ever and ever amen, and it branched off from there to something a little different that I wasn't expecting. Thoughts, concrit, put-downs, comments, not-comments? :D Nyuk nyuk nyuk.
Roots
“It’s always the little things, isn’t it?”
She is crouching at the base of the tree like a squirrel, unmoving and altogether silent, outside of the tent in the cool air of early morning with the moon silent like the hiding sun and the sky bleeding blue, clear like the summer pond he filled up his flask with yesterday. This is the first thing she has said to him.
Vincent looks at Yuffie.
“…What do you mean?”
But he thinks that he knows what she means. Very well, actually, and for her picking up on that is mildly frightening for him. Vincent is not one to fear other people. He is surprised that she is not intimidated by him, like the others are.
“Nevermind. Go back to sleep, ducky.”
Vincent is genuinely befuddled for the first time in many, many years - years, years turned to decades, isn’t that right - and his mind protests such a rather demeaning nickname, but his open eyes find her, and he is again surprised to find that she is not unmoving and silent at all. She is quivering with the promise of motion, and her mouth is trembling from anticipation to form a sound like a writhing newborn, naked and unsure and full of life.
She is smiling at him. Cheekily, very much a teenager. A child.
He looks again and she is alive and much, much older.
(He blinks and forgets what he saw.)
It is early in the morning with the moon still like she would never be, and she is something radically new and something that he finds himself wanting to swallow whole. Vincent has forgotten himself and doesn’t even know it in his dazed state; his eyes drift shut to the sight of her creeping towards the butterfly that beats its wings slowly, before pouncing and laughing openly as it escapes her with those wings that still flap, unwavering forever in a steady rhythm.
-
Between Vincent, Red XIII, and Yuffie, there is a common understanding; Vincent does not care, much, but he is… relieved, relieved that they are a group.
All very much different in their own ways.
He doesn’t think any of them handle people well.
When he tries to stop thinking - thinking - (restsleepstaygowaitpleasewhyloveyouhateyouBANG) - thinking, when he stops trying when he tries stopping which he shouldn’t, but does sometimes because he’s incredibly weak, Vincent notices that Nanaki seems uncomfortable in towns, unsure and unlike the beast (not unlike Vincent, who still sometimes reaches with his claw or wants to ruffle his hair and can’t keep his eyes off the ground in crowds). Yuffie is guarded around strangers, which doesn’t make sense until Vincent realizes that she does this exactly by being open.
“…There is a lake, perhaps thirty meters or so east,” Nanaki informs them suddenly, flicking his tail as he does so. Sparks fall away, sizzling and dying before hitting the ground.
“I regret to say it, but our chances of encountering monsters that could otherwise be avoided are heightened largely by the scent of both of you. Your clothing is beginning to smell rank.”
“Heeey, whadabout you, huh? You smell pretty funky, too, don’t single US out!”
“I smell like an animal,” the beast answers. “Common. My scent is no different from a wolf, currently. If I bathed I would smell like my own species, which would also attract predators. You both reek of sweat and dirt that… is not common among most animal species.”
They go to the lake.
They also end up sleeping there, next to the water that is deathly still as the moon reflects from it mournfully.
Vincent stands and watches it for a long, long time before turning his head. (For some reason, he can’t turn completely away.)
He watches his sleeping companions.
Yuffie is sleeping against Nanaki, curled against his side. They breathe together, and they are very comfortable with each other. Perhaps it is the fact that they are both so young. Or that they were the only real outcasts before Vincent joined the group.
Yuffie looks younger, like this. She looks like a child, and Vincent watches her small fist curl a little tighter around the rich colored red fur. Sleeping. Easy in, easy out.
She is a child, only a child, and Vincent’s human hand flexes in a short twitch. He could break her neck. Save her, from things that he’s seen and done, because this is a dangerous road that they’re all traveling on. Vincent has already gone down it. Maybe more times than he can count.
He could snap her neck in half cleanly, efficiently, rearrange it to look like she had died of poison. In her sleep, never knowing. Save that innocence she will one day mourn the loss of.
His stomach clenches painfully and Vincent’s eyes sting. She is the most lively of the bunch.
Yuffie’s eyes open blearily.
And he wonders how he could think her a child at all.
“Get over here, vampy,” she calls out, and makes him sit against the other side of Nanaki. “…Makin’ me feel bad. Ain’t got nothin’ but dirt-shit, damn straight, left our stupid bags with the others ‘cuz Tifa was feelin’ real sick. I feel like Cid.” She rambles, now, and Vincent feels like retching for thinking. Add another sin to the list, and this one was all his own and he’s getting worse. And he doesn’t know what that means, but his skin crawls and his left hand pulses and throbs and he thinks of rotting flesh.
“Hey-hey, if I puked I bet it’d come up tar. All that crap smokers inhale… like the sakura petals in spring, crush’m up and spread ‘em out good, goodnight forever and always… miss miss miss them all, yunno, back to Leviathan flowing back into god back and he saves his children ‘n I’ll kill Rufus next time I see him… worst babysitter ever, shoulda kicked ‘im real good when I had the chance…”
She doesn’t seem to be speaking to him. Yuffie falls asleep again.
Vincent feels warmer despite the cool night breeze. The moon sits off on his left, and he falls asleep facing the stars straight above.
-
A different place, a different time and Vincent douses the fire to the cool twilight air as the others pull up their sleeping bags and he will take watch. It’s been a long day, a long day, and he’s unsure and silent and wants to curl up in his own secondhand bag that is bright yellow, courtesy of one ninja until they can get him his own. Long day - long day, long decade long life, and he is so incredibly tired and just wants to curl up like the little boy he isn’t in the yellow secondhand sleeping bag and never get up again.
(He doesn’t admit this feeling to himself.)
These people are very close, he thinks. The sky is clear enough that they all mutually decide it a waste to pull out the tents, and Vincent sees why with an upturned chin to look up.
The sky is clear like a marble as twilight sets in.
(I wish I were the sky, he thinks. And then he feels minutely ridiculous and tries to look away.)
Aeris says a soft goodnight that echoes, magnified, through the emptiness of their camping space at the edge of an open meadow, green and every blade swaying in the quiet breeze. There is a murmured reply of the same from the others.
Vincent sits against a tree. He will take watch tonight.
He can’t help looking at the sky.
And he can’t stop. His eyes won’t look away, and it’s vaguely alarming in a very slow, mellow sense of the word.
Vincent finally tears his eyes from the expanse above them all. (It is almost painful.) He watches his companions for a moment.
Yuffie is not among their number. He looks up again, as high as his neck tilts his head back, and her leg is swinging tiredly against the base of the tree she leans against as well, from her spot on a thick, mellow wood branch.
“Take your sleeping bag.”
She twists her body in a way that makes him wonder if she will fall. She doesn’t, and instead is leaning where she sees him as her hair, short and boyish, is falling around her face, towards the ground.
“I’m taking over your watch at half-night,” is the reply, in a rather bouncy sort of voice. She has an accent, he notices. Slight. Very slight, but it slips through every so often. (Like his.) Nice to listen to. “Save myself the trouble, anyway. Sides, ‘s safer up here.”
“…Safer?”
“Monsters,” she replies immediately, yawning loud and fake. “Attracted to big groups. I’ll use my own once we all split up again. I’ve been sleeping in trees all my life, Dr. Depress-o. One more night shouldn’t kill me.”
She seems content to leave it at that.
Vincent looks up. Her foot still swings, steady on its own beat.
There is silence, for a moment, with only the wind against the trees and the grass, and the crickets and distant wildlife.
“Is it?” he finds himself whispering.
There is shuffling as she flips around on the tree, arms and legs hanging limply, her face above his own. It is young. Younger than he looked, at sixteen.
She opens her eyes. Old. Older than he looked, at sixteen.
“Does thirty years of bed-hair give lice?”
He doesn’t reply, and only watches her, her with her eyes closed and a childish face and then she says, “thought so,” and then doesn’t say anything after that.
Four hours later, when the moon is pouring cool air and white from her shining face Vincent stands.
“Yuffie,” he says. She vaults down, surprisingly limber and landing on her feet, wide-awake. She slides wordlessly down to sit in the place he was just occupying.
“…It is,” she confirms quietly later, much later when he is inside the beat-up bright yellow sleeping bag.
Yuffie is very much the same as him. Very much alone around people. Unable to connect. Never really understanding them.
But Yuffie pretends to, he thinks.
She is an old woman waiting to drown, she is a young child flailing in the ocean.
“I want to set the sky on fire,” she tells him unexpectedly. The words echo through the sky that is forever blue, and he falls asleep to the comforting words.
-
It is morning, and they sit together.
This is how the groupings fell, and they seem to stick together. They are both outcasts in their own rights.
She doesn’t seem very comfortable around people. But she smiles, mostly, cheeky and childish when her eyes aren’t old, jumpy and unable to sit still.
“I dunno how to act around people,” she announces to him, sounding like she wants to know tomorrow’s weather. Yuffie sits across from him; they are in a restaurant, connecting to the inn, sitting in a small wooden booth that is the color of bright oak. A window that takes up the entire expanse of wall lets in midmorning sunlight. Yuffie faces away from it, booth feet drawn away from the floor and a sugar packet in one hand, a bright red apple in the other. She fiddles with both. He’s found that she tends to do this, no matter how she feels or acts or what she says.
“You… pretend you do,” he tells her.
The sun flows into his eyes, her small form the only block. It goes over the top of her head. Yuffie looks like a child, Yuffie looks like an old woman.
Vincent blinks, and Yuffie looks like Yuffie.
“But I don’t. I am selfish,” she states this matter-of-factly. “I was on my own for so long that I forgot. I prob’ly even forgot all of the stupid lessons I had to learn. They were torture. Except rope-escape classes. I am now an advocate of believing you cannot have too many rope-escape classes. But the other ones sucked. Like tea ceremonies. I hated those,” she is saying conversationally as she dumps the whole sugar package into her mouth.
He never knows quite what to say to her.
“I… don’t know very much about people. We are similar in that respect.” He is not trying to sympathize. Vincent does not sympathize, empathize, comfort. (He was in the Turks of his own accord.)
This brings him back to reality.
Many things he has been hiding behind his eyelids burst forward.
“We crazies have to stick together,” Yuffie is telling him absently as she focuses on the apple that she rolls down her shoulder to flick off of her wrist and catch.
He doesn’t reply.
A dog barks happily in the background and goes running to splash through the slowly vanishing puddles across the street, through the window, a blur of gold across the cobblestone. A boy trails after it, a smile so wide it could crack a star clean in two.
-
They are in their lonely threesome again, looking for their Aeris.
Vincent doesn’t know when she became theirs, but there it is - they’re all a sort of family now, though he hesitates on the thought, on the word, they’re all a sort of family now and if Vincent is honest with himself (something he finds he isn’t often, which is a little surprising, though not shocking, in of itself) they all seem to hold bits and pieces of each other together.
The Northern Continent is truly a sight. The temperature leaves their breath white, and the clouds swirl above to hide the sun, while the air is clean and the rivers are so cold they make his teeth ache bitter-sweetly. They walk along one.
“Red, d’you pick anything up?” Yuffie kicks a rock absently.
She’s worried. Genuinely worried, and she hides it but her eyes are old and her ears prick every so often for a sound that Vincent knows she is hoping to be a giggle, a fumble, a song.
“…This is not the direction she would have gone,” Nanaki replies evenly after a moment. “Aeris’ scent isn’t even close. Cloud sent us in this direction, but I have the feeling we should turn back.”
They all share one glance. And they each understand each other, to an extent, because they are a sort of family.
Vincent is not surprised when they all turn around at the same moment to retrace their steps, Red leading the way. Yuffie and Vincent follow, and the set pace is fast. They care about their Aeris. Vincent also cares about Aeris - she was respectful to him, until they talked. And then he became another AVALANCHE-er, to Aeris, and that was something, and it was unexpected, and she reminds him of his mother that he barely remembers and doesn’t think on very often.
“Shi-“ Yuffie fumbles and pulls out her phone. “Spikes? Wh- okay. K. Yeah, we’re actually on our way back now. Bye.”
They go to Bone Village, rock and dust and snow, and as a family - a sort of screwed up, dysfunctional but very real family, and the thought leaves Vincent with a sort of shiver that is warm and cold - they trek through the forest and Vincent feels it, and it is very real and makes him want to sit, for a while, or for maybe much longer and the mako in his blood pulses in beat with the planet beneath him.
They walk into the most beautiful city Vincent thinks he’s ever seen. Into a house, with a lake outside that feels so calm - steps, spiraling down -
And Aeris-
Their Aeris-
Her eyes are open when the long blade elegantly slides through her belly, sweet and slow like a waltz as she sags like a porcelain doll, her hair unraveling softly and the marble from its place atop her crown falling with honey sounded chinks off of the stone into the water on a beat all its own.
The last time Vincent sees Aeris, she is quietly sinking. (Her lips are still smiling.)
Yuffie cries hard.
Vincent sees her sitting limply, at first, and Red XIII wanders towards her aimlessly, curling up with his head buried in her lap while she strokes his fur with her slim fingers shivering.
It is only later when she does let it out. It’s been a long hour long day long week, and they are all so very, very tired and Vincent feels it, too, cold like slippery ice in a bucket to swallow up like fire.
Yuffie is outside, and she is pouring tears and loneliness and unhappiness out her eyes and nose and mouth and ears, flooding and his brain is empty and his hand throbs and his legs are numb and when he walks out the inn door into the snow, the screen door clacking shut behind him, she turns and for one immeasurable second watches him with soaking hair and clothes and frosty lashes and lips and then barrels all ninety-something pounds of herself into his chest, pounding her tiny fists curled up tight into balls into his chest again and again, in one mass of runny-nosed, red-faced crying screaming Yuffie.
He waits, waits and waits and when she tires and collapses and just cries, just crying salt and water in great big plops to land on his shirt, he patiently picks her up like a young child, like a sick elder, and holds her quietly, rocking her gently, watching the snow and wondering what happened before going inside to fall asleep in a chair, with her curled up like a wet cat on his lap, with her making him feel like a little boy wanting to crawl into her skin and never come out, listening to the sound of her soft breathing.
-
“It’s a different perspective, from here,” and her voice is easy and clear.
Yuffie is much different around him, from the others.
They are both outcasts in their own right. And they identify with each other, to a point. And it is this common bond that sets them together as he is on the grass of the open field with Yuffie, spread out like feathers, soft and easy and everything good in the world to watch the marble-clear blue sky.
Something big is coming. And they both know it; the word meteor bounces around inside his skull like a stream, trickling and easy. It is very easy to stop thinking.
And for once, Vincent lets him forget himself. Because he is weak and useless and tired, and she makes him think he needs this. So he does forget himself, and is relaxed and unworried while the planet seeps himself away into the good earth.
The dying afternoon sun is casting shadows, over the blue blanket that stretches out before them, but it is overpowered by summer streaks that hit his eyes, smiling and casual and it doesn’t bother him in the slightest. Deep breaths leave him in awe of this world.
“It is the small things,” and his voice floats upwards and echoes in the vast expanse of blue bleeding pink and yellow and orange.
“…I told you that to get something through your thick brain-skull-thingy, and you’re just getting it now?”
He hears the smile in Yuffie’s voice. It sounds very old and very young, and he decides that it is just Yuffie, who is timeless and unsure and livelier than Leviathan himself in the water, Yuffie who laughs open and free and the wind carries her voice.
Tomorrow, they will awaken and she will once again be bearing the emotions of the group, she will once again flit between that young girl and that old woman, and he will remember himself and his shoulders will be weighed again, again just as always, and they will have things to do and miles to go and oceans to cross. Tomorrow brings dirt and darkness and loneliness, he knows.
Vincent feels like the precious child-woman beside him and doesn’t think about that right now.
Somewhere near here, he hears children laughing.