Princess of the White Rose [1/5]
Title: Princess of the White rose [1/5]
Rating: Pg-13
Warning:Nothing but a little language and minor character death.
Summary: Moments that build a ninja. Yuffie's headcanon according to Shelly. Some deleted canon mixed with real canon and things I tried to put together.
Note: It's Five. I lied. FFVII's chapter would be insane if I didn't split it.
She is barely a year old when the war begins. Her mother becomes quickly disturbed to find her daughter can sleep as easily through the cannon fire that comes up from the beaches as she can lullabies.
~
Yuffie is six years old when she first hears the name Shinra and can put a face to this name. Her father (back when her father was still father and not Godo) is speaking in a language she cannot understand to men who look like nothing she’s ever seen before in her life. She sits sieza beside her mother watching the way these men speak, and the way her father loses his temper slowly in stages until he’s screaming at these men with masks on. Silver reflective masks, and she can see her father’s face twisted in rage reflecting back at him. She almost forgets her place and stands to yell too, though her mother’s arm wraps around her like a shield. She remembers the look of her mother’s pale face with an expression something like fear. At the time she has no idea what’s being said, and therefore thinks her father had won when the men leave, her father’s voice still ringing in the hall.
He hadn’t.
~
Shinra doesn’t take kindly to the word ‘No’. They don’t find out how bad the situation is for another six months. Yuffie is seven and her father promises to let her in the council chamber if she will keep quiet. So she does.
This is the first time she hears the name Sephiroth. She hears it often, talking of this boy and how he can command. He’s closer to her age then her father’s, and she hears the word demon thrown about in the chamber, reverberating off the walls and settling in her dreams that night. She wakes up screaming when her nurse enters the room, setting off the homemade trap meant to stop the demon.
She ends up scolded, sent back to bed, and told she isn’t allowed back in the council chamber if she’s going to behave so ridiculously.
The next time she wakes with nightmares, she keeps them to herself.
~
She’s eight when the official embargo is put in place. It takes her an hour to understand what is going on, the words are mostly in Gaian and she’s not quite fluent. But she can understand her mother’s harsh words to the general currently holding the front. She can hear things about surrender and how it’s not an option. She hears her mother say words she’s never heard her say in her life. All of them angry.
Her father catches her hiding behind the drapes and tells her she’s supposed to be in lessons. He pulls her out from hiding and ushers her out the door.
As she leaves she catches the way her mother’s face drains of color seeing her there and the image will stay with her for the rest of her life.
~
It’s four months later and her mother’s face still is pale as the day she left the council room. She’s gained dark rims around her eyes that look like she’s never slept a day in her life, and her skin looks weak and bruises far easier then it ever had before. Her mother is the strongest woman she knows, and it’s slowly getting harder and harder to see why.
She walks in to her mother and father talking alone over some matter quietly in their chambers and hides herself behind a statue by the door, positive that it’s not something to interrupt. Her father watches her mother calmly from where they are sitting comfortably close. Even at eight, she knows that her parents are connected in a way like you’d expect from myths. Her father was a prince when they met after all, so it makes perfect sense to her.
Kasumi looks half asleep by the time the conversation is almost over and Yuffie could swear it almost looks like her father is about to cry as he’s stroking her hair.
She pretends she didn’t see and leaves quietly as she came, truly grateful to her training for the first time when she isn’t caught.
~
It’s the rainy season in Wutai when Yuffie’s whole world crashes down on her.
Or, it might as well be the world. It seems enough like it.
She likes to think the sky is crying with her as they let Kasumi Kisaragi return to the Lifestream.
(She tries to ignore even years later how Godo doesn’t look at her for two weeks afterwards and even after that, it’s only a passing bow at some ceremonial dinner. Yuffie is angry enough at her father without taking the time to pick apart a time where she was grieving too much to care to add more reasons to the mess.)
~
She’s ten years old when she sees her first SOLDIERs up close. They’re delivering some attempt at a treaty and they’re both so proud and look so strong that even she, daughter of the Lord of Wutai, feels nervous.
The one talks in such a strange pattern and his manner is so practiced that it makes Yuffie’s eyes glaze. Speaking of ‘World’s End’ to people who’s world you’re ending is pretty damn mean as far as she’s concerned and she loses all attempts at caring what the man has to say after he’s gotten only about half his speech in.
The other is a lot calmer and quieter. If she didn’t know better, she’d think he was one of their warriors with his even temper. He doesn’t yell, or whoop, or talk funny, he’s focused and obviously a lot more worthy of the honor of being allowed into the capital. Not that either of them are, she quickly catches herself and amends, but he’s better then the other one.
And she actually does bow to him in respect when they leave. The red haired one doesn’t even seem to notice one tiny princess’s act of rebellion, though the calm one does. She pretends to not enjoy the small smile she gets, but does anyway.
~
She’s eleven when she meets one.
He’s smaller then she’d expect, though still much larger then her, and all her plans fly out of her mind the second she’s in a foot of him. She’d planned to steal from him, to get revenge for his disgracing their warriors, to hurt him…. But when she’s in front of the man she quickly realizes that no matter what she says, he’s still very much taller then her and is carrying a sword.
She ran away without a weapon that morning, trying to escape lessons and a strict nurse and now, trying to guard a temple that has better guardians then she can hope to be (Magic does beat the greatest in Wutai. Just by a little.).
Yuffie’s honestly surprised when he plays along, taking her for a kid who is playing instead of a child warrior who realized at the last moment exactly what she was dealing with.
For once, she’s just fine to not be taken seriously and makes it all the way back to her room before she stops running.
~
It’s the rainy season again, and Yuffie stands beside Godo as he signs their surrender. Really, the war’s been over for about a month, there just hit a point where nothing they did worked and the infamous Silver General has come to do things before the press.
She remembers years of nightmares and doesn’t look up the entire time waiting in the hall for the guests to arrive and Shinra’s press. All the press is for Shinra. Shinra’s the only group with something to prove. They’re still proud. They’re still Wutanese. And they have nothing to prove.
That’s what Godo says anyway. And she believes him.
She looks when she hears the doors open and hears the rush of sound from outside. It’s loud and there is far too much of it, there’s people shouting and the bustle of people and cameras is a chaos the likes of which Yuffie has never seen in her life and she watches in awe of the sheer level of noise and movement she can sense and see.
And then the ‘diplomatic’ party finally enters the room, and she’s instantly distracted. The person she sees before her is both everything and nothing like she expected and it is astounding to think that this man is younger then Godo when he carries himself with equal pride.
She is surprised, as is Godo, when he orders the doors shut, locking the press on the other side. Godo tenses beside her as the General comes further into the room and speaks in simple, clean Wutanese.
“I don’t think we should make a scene of this.”
He is calm and direct, and though it’s easy to see the kind of leader he is, he seems to at least be willing to behave reasonably in their halls throughout the whole meeting.
The entire time, Yuffie glares at him through her hair and finds herself wishing he made it easier for her to hate him.
~
She’s thirteen the first time she yells at Godo. Full out, angry, loud, yelling that fills the halls and makes people stop and stare at the royal family’s breakdown in the middle of the hall. Her father had just dissolved the main branch of the military, only an hour ago. Sending the men back to their jobs and lives, even those who had fought their whole lives and knew nothing else.
“You’re catering to them! This wasn’t in the treaty, father, and we both know it! I’ve read it as many times as you have!’
She never forgives him for the way the fire in his eyes doesn’t match his voice, and how he simply tells her she knows nothing and sends her to her chambers with little more then a glance.
She thinks she could have forgiven him if he’d simply yelled at her, done anything else.
As long as it hadn’t been that.
As it is, she doesn’t speak to him for the next week straight.
~
It’s two months later when she finally unlocks a limit, she’s three months shy of fourteen and her teacher is practically giddy. Well, as giddy as that man can get.
“It’s wonderful, Lady Yuffie! And so early too! Your father will be so proud! We should inform him immediately!”
It takes him two days to get the message, and by then, even the workers on the docks are congratulating her on her success.
When he finally does say something, it’s in passing on the second day, and she simply does not respond, turns on her heel, and leaves.
~
It’s just past her fourteenth birthday when she stops calling him Father.
She thinks it’s depressing that the officials in the room had a more extreme response to her being so disrespectful then he did.
So she simply vows to not call him her Father until he acts like it again.
~
She’s four and a half months from fifteen and the Turks show up for vacation in Wutai.
It’s barely five minutes after she sees them that she is throwing open the doors to Godo’s council chamber, screaming about how he could let these people even back on their shores-
…And is face to face with a traitor in a black suit.
It’s the first time she really hates a Turk for being anything more then just that, and the first time she hates Godo for sitting with the traitor over paperwork and tea like a social gathering.
She’s crying by the time she hits her room, and stops by the time the cleaning woman from downstairs has followed her in to ask what was wrong two minutes later, grinning at her with too many teeth and a heart that’s breaking.
She’s their damned Princess and there is no way in hell she’s going to let herself cry over this anymore then she already has.
~
On her birthday, she sits very calmly up in the mountains overlooking Wutai. She’s sitting on the head of one of the enormous statues, looking at her city, her people…Her home.
She can only think of one thing to do to help them. She has to get stronger, to bring strength to them. The only thing she can think of are the glowing crystals that brought the other side so much power during the war.
Magic, Power, Mako…..Those are the things the world is run on now. And Godo can’t see it, wont see it. That what they need to fight back are the things they’re fighting.
She doesn’t want to see people turned into monsters with glowing eyes, she doesn’t want to see things like the pictures of the reactors she’s seen in books, she doesn’t want to see a world powered by the Shinra electric power company.
All she wants is Wutai. She wants it like she remembers, she wants music and Origami and pride and warriors and….
She wants….
She wants her parents back.
But there’s only so much she can do. So she’ll do what she must, to get what she can.
~
The summer after her fifteenth birthday there is a very nice, clear day. It’s almost surprisingly nice. But no one in Wutai seems to take notice. The entire city is in an uproar and the Princess is halfway across the island by ten that morning.
By nightfall she takes her first steps onto the main content of Gaia.
~
The three days after, she almost turns right around and goes home. She hasn’t been alone this long before in her life, and it feels….Odd. It’s almost-…
She feels lonely. For the first time in her life she is truly alone. Really and totally alone.
But she remembers why she left in the first place, so she doesn’t. Instead, she goes hunting, catches dinner, sets up her campsite and polishes her shuriken while her dinner cooks.
When it’s done, she cleans up after herself, curls up in her bedroll, and watches the stars.
And she has no regrets at all.
Rating: Pg-13
Warning:Nothing but a little language and minor character death.
Summary: Moments that build a ninja. Yuffie's headcanon according to Shelly. Some deleted canon mixed with real canon and things I tried to put together.
Note: It's Five. I lied. FFVII's chapter would be insane if I didn't split it.
She is barely a year old when the war begins. Her mother becomes quickly disturbed to find her daughter can sleep as easily through the cannon fire that comes up from the beaches as she can lullabies.
~
Yuffie is six years old when she first hears the name Shinra and can put a face to this name. Her father (back when her father was still father and not Godo) is speaking in a language she cannot understand to men who look like nothing she’s ever seen before in her life. She sits sieza beside her mother watching the way these men speak, and the way her father loses his temper slowly in stages until he’s screaming at these men with masks on. Silver reflective masks, and she can see her father’s face twisted in rage reflecting back at him. She almost forgets her place and stands to yell too, though her mother’s arm wraps around her like a shield. She remembers the look of her mother’s pale face with an expression something like fear. At the time she has no idea what’s being said, and therefore thinks her father had won when the men leave, her father’s voice still ringing in the hall.
He hadn’t.
~
Shinra doesn’t take kindly to the word ‘No’. They don’t find out how bad the situation is for another six months. Yuffie is seven and her father promises to let her in the council chamber if she will keep quiet. So she does.
This is the first time she hears the name Sephiroth. She hears it often, talking of this boy and how he can command. He’s closer to her age then her father’s, and she hears the word demon thrown about in the chamber, reverberating off the walls and settling in her dreams that night. She wakes up screaming when her nurse enters the room, setting off the homemade trap meant to stop the demon.
She ends up scolded, sent back to bed, and told she isn’t allowed back in the council chamber if she’s going to behave so ridiculously.
The next time she wakes with nightmares, she keeps them to herself.
~
She’s eight when the official embargo is put in place. It takes her an hour to understand what is going on, the words are mostly in Gaian and she’s not quite fluent. But she can understand her mother’s harsh words to the general currently holding the front. She can hear things about surrender and how it’s not an option. She hears her mother say words she’s never heard her say in her life. All of them angry.
Her father catches her hiding behind the drapes and tells her she’s supposed to be in lessons. He pulls her out from hiding and ushers her out the door.
As she leaves she catches the way her mother’s face drains of color seeing her there and the image will stay with her for the rest of her life.
~
It’s four months later and her mother’s face still is pale as the day she left the council room. She’s gained dark rims around her eyes that look like she’s never slept a day in her life, and her skin looks weak and bruises far easier then it ever had before. Her mother is the strongest woman she knows, and it’s slowly getting harder and harder to see why.
She walks in to her mother and father talking alone over some matter quietly in their chambers and hides herself behind a statue by the door, positive that it’s not something to interrupt. Her father watches her mother calmly from where they are sitting comfortably close. Even at eight, she knows that her parents are connected in a way like you’d expect from myths. Her father was a prince when they met after all, so it makes perfect sense to her.
Kasumi looks half asleep by the time the conversation is almost over and Yuffie could swear it almost looks like her father is about to cry as he’s stroking her hair.
She pretends she didn’t see and leaves quietly as she came, truly grateful to her training for the first time when she isn’t caught.
~
It’s the rainy season in Wutai when Yuffie’s whole world crashes down on her.
Or, it might as well be the world. It seems enough like it.
She likes to think the sky is crying with her as they let Kasumi Kisaragi return to the Lifestream.
(She tries to ignore even years later how Godo doesn’t look at her for two weeks afterwards and even after that, it’s only a passing bow at some ceremonial dinner. Yuffie is angry enough at her father without taking the time to pick apart a time where she was grieving too much to care to add more reasons to the mess.)
~
She’s ten years old when she sees her first SOLDIERs up close. They’re delivering some attempt at a treaty and they’re both so proud and look so strong that even she, daughter of the Lord of Wutai, feels nervous.
The one talks in such a strange pattern and his manner is so practiced that it makes Yuffie’s eyes glaze. Speaking of ‘World’s End’ to people who’s world you’re ending is pretty damn mean as far as she’s concerned and she loses all attempts at caring what the man has to say after he’s gotten only about half his speech in.
The other is a lot calmer and quieter. If she didn’t know better, she’d think he was one of their warriors with his even temper. He doesn’t yell, or whoop, or talk funny, he’s focused and obviously a lot more worthy of the honor of being allowed into the capital. Not that either of them are, she quickly catches herself and amends, but he’s better then the other one.
And she actually does bow to him in respect when they leave. The red haired one doesn’t even seem to notice one tiny princess’s act of rebellion, though the calm one does. She pretends to not enjoy the small smile she gets, but does anyway.
~
She’s eleven when she meets one.
He’s smaller then she’d expect, though still much larger then her, and all her plans fly out of her mind the second she’s in a foot of him. She’d planned to steal from him, to get revenge for his disgracing their warriors, to hurt him…. But when she’s in front of the man she quickly realizes that no matter what she says, he’s still very much taller then her and is carrying a sword.
She ran away without a weapon that morning, trying to escape lessons and a strict nurse and now, trying to guard a temple that has better guardians then she can hope to be (Magic does beat the greatest in Wutai. Just by a little.).
Yuffie’s honestly surprised when he plays along, taking her for a kid who is playing instead of a child warrior who realized at the last moment exactly what she was dealing with.
For once, she’s just fine to not be taken seriously and makes it all the way back to her room before she stops running.
~
It’s the rainy season again, and Yuffie stands beside Godo as he signs their surrender. Really, the war’s been over for about a month, there just hit a point where nothing they did worked and the infamous Silver General has come to do things before the press.
She remembers years of nightmares and doesn’t look up the entire time waiting in the hall for the guests to arrive and Shinra’s press. All the press is for Shinra. Shinra’s the only group with something to prove. They’re still proud. They’re still Wutanese. And they have nothing to prove.
That’s what Godo says anyway. And she believes him.
She looks when she hears the doors open and hears the rush of sound from outside. It’s loud and there is far too much of it, there’s people shouting and the bustle of people and cameras is a chaos the likes of which Yuffie has never seen in her life and she watches in awe of the sheer level of noise and movement she can sense and see.
And then the ‘diplomatic’ party finally enters the room, and she’s instantly distracted. The person she sees before her is both everything and nothing like she expected and it is astounding to think that this man is younger then Godo when he carries himself with equal pride.
She is surprised, as is Godo, when he orders the doors shut, locking the press on the other side. Godo tenses beside her as the General comes further into the room and speaks in simple, clean Wutanese.
“I don’t think we should make a scene of this.”
He is calm and direct, and though it’s easy to see the kind of leader he is, he seems to at least be willing to behave reasonably in their halls throughout the whole meeting.
The entire time, Yuffie glares at him through her hair and finds herself wishing he made it easier for her to hate him.
~
She’s thirteen the first time she yells at Godo. Full out, angry, loud, yelling that fills the halls and makes people stop and stare at the royal family’s breakdown in the middle of the hall. Her father had just dissolved the main branch of the military, only an hour ago. Sending the men back to their jobs and lives, even those who had fought their whole lives and knew nothing else.
“You’re catering to them! This wasn’t in the treaty, father, and we both know it! I’ve read it as many times as you have!’
She never forgives him for the way the fire in his eyes doesn’t match his voice, and how he simply tells her she knows nothing and sends her to her chambers with little more then a glance.
She thinks she could have forgiven him if he’d simply yelled at her, done anything else.
As long as it hadn’t been that.
As it is, she doesn’t speak to him for the next week straight.
~
It’s two months later when she finally unlocks a limit, she’s three months shy of fourteen and her teacher is practically giddy. Well, as giddy as that man can get.
“It’s wonderful, Lady Yuffie! And so early too! Your father will be so proud! We should inform him immediately!”
It takes him two days to get the message, and by then, even the workers on the docks are congratulating her on her success.
When he finally does say something, it’s in passing on the second day, and she simply does not respond, turns on her heel, and leaves.
~
It’s just past her fourteenth birthday when she stops calling him Father.
She thinks it’s depressing that the officials in the room had a more extreme response to her being so disrespectful then he did.
So she simply vows to not call him her Father until he acts like it again.
~
She’s four and a half months from fifteen and the Turks show up for vacation in Wutai.
It’s barely five minutes after she sees them that she is throwing open the doors to Godo’s council chamber, screaming about how he could let these people even back on their shores-
…And is face to face with a traitor in a black suit.
It’s the first time she really hates a Turk for being anything more then just that, and the first time she hates Godo for sitting with the traitor over paperwork and tea like a social gathering.
She’s crying by the time she hits her room, and stops by the time the cleaning woman from downstairs has followed her in to ask what was wrong two minutes later, grinning at her with too many teeth and a heart that’s breaking.
She’s their damned Princess and there is no way in hell she’s going to let herself cry over this anymore then she already has.
~
On her birthday, she sits very calmly up in the mountains overlooking Wutai. She’s sitting on the head of one of the enormous statues, looking at her city, her people…Her home.
She can only think of one thing to do to help them. She has to get stronger, to bring strength to them. The only thing she can think of are the glowing crystals that brought the other side so much power during the war.
Magic, Power, Mako…..Those are the things the world is run on now. And Godo can’t see it, wont see it. That what they need to fight back are the things they’re fighting.
She doesn’t want to see people turned into monsters with glowing eyes, she doesn’t want to see things like the pictures of the reactors she’s seen in books, she doesn’t want to see a world powered by the Shinra electric power company.
All she wants is Wutai. She wants it like she remembers, she wants music and Origami and pride and warriors and….
She wants….
She wants her parents back.
But there’s only so much she can do. So she’ll do what she must, to get what she can.
~
The summer after her fifteenth birthday there is a very nice, clear day. It’s almost surprisingly nice. But no one in Wutai seems to take notice. The entire city is in an uproar and the Princess is halfway across the island by ten that morning.
By nightfall she takes her first steps onto the main content of Gaia.
~
The three days after, she almost turns right around and goes home. She hasn’t been alone this long before in her life, and it feels….Odd. It’s almost-…
She feels lonely. For the first time in her life she is truly alone. Really and totally alone.
But she remembers why she left in the first place, so she doesn’t. Instead, she goes hunting, catches dinner, sets up her campsite and polishes her shuriken while her dinner cooks.
When it’s done, she cleans up after herself, curls up in her bedroll, and watches the stars.
And she has no regrets at all.