Title: The Words to Say
Fandom: Final Fantasy VII
Pairing/Characters: Yuffie x Vincent
Notes: Written for fairymage's 2006 Lyrics Challenge.
At the end of every month, she would pen a careful letter and send it on its way to Nibelheim. This was because Vincent was useless and backward and old, and hung up on her before she was finished telling him why he should move to Gold Saucer, or Rocket Town, or even just another house that was mostly above the ground, because hadn't he listened to Barret The Miner about how subterranean living made you crazy?
She wrote him letters because if she actually spoke to him she usually wanted to shake him until he stopped being dumb – and since she couldn't do that over PHS, she let her words shake him, instead, and that sometimes made him so mad she could hear his teeth grinding over the line – which was creepy as hell, calling at midnight, because it was either midnight or peak time and she was a princess, not a billionaire.
She told him about what she was doing, how crazy Godo was driving her, how the monsters on Da Chao were getting weaker and weaker because it'd taken her four-and-a-half days to shift a Transform to third level when it should've only taken three. She told him about herself, and she told him about the rest – Cloud and Tifa, Cid and Shera, Reeve and His Favourite Transistor, okay-so-they-were-not-a-couple-but-she-w ouldn't-put-it-past-Reeve-really.
Her letters went for pages, sometimes sideways up and down the margins on the last one if she had to stick something in a post-script. His were short and undescriptive. He was clearing out the mansion, very slowly. He was considering having the laboratory walled up, but was uncertain of whether he could trust a stonemason. The youth of Nibelheim were entirely too fascinated with knocking on his door and sprinting away down the path. (Yuffie laughed herself sick every time that one came up.)
He was moving on, slowly and jerkily and with undeniable Vincent-ness, but he wasn't really.
He was moving on in the same place, that same house, and eventually Yuffie wrote, 'You know, you should get out of there. Do something. Catch your dreams, and all that.'
Vincent's reply had been fey and discouraging: 'I would not wish to catch the greater number of my dreams, Kisaragi Yuffie, and anything I would wish to salvage has already taken wing.'
That steamed her enough that she called and left a message – just a short one, because he had an uncanny ability to pick up halted conversations – on his stupid PHS with its stupid, 'Vincent. …leave a message,' that totally did not fool her every time.
"So where's your butterfly net?"
And he called back – at four in the morning, because he was socially retarded and had obviously forgotten that Nibelheim and Wutai were not in the same timezone – and while she was still groggy and half-asleep, said, "If you love something, let it go. If it returns, it is yours."
And she said, "What?" because, come on, it was four in the morning and she was not ready for Midgarian idioms.
And he said, haltingly, "If it does not—"
And she said, "Vincent Valentine, I will hunt you down and kill you," and hung up, and it wasn't until he arrived, a week later, in Wutai that she realised the significance of that.