That

Other people—specifically people not Vincent—think in words. Vincent Valentine, after a period of trial and error-also known as his life, came to realize that this unquantifiable gap in thought processes bore the brunt of the blame for his inability to seamlessly communicate.

Vincent thought in vague shapes and colors: half sensations crawling along the walls of his inner cortex, too fleeting to become concrete. He relied on a faulty black box mechanism to sputter out inadequate and inexpressive sentences. It also handled the reverse process. Vincent read slower, took longer to contribute to a conversation, and often burned through the patience of his acquaintances before the value of his commentary could be considered.

So he gave up.

Daily, he felt his internal frustrations distance him further from the people around him. Eventually, he became his own words, locked comfortably inside a coffin for thirty years.

Doctor Crescent had not provided him the respite he had needed either. Their relationship served a use-use purpose. Both sought physical relief from the stress of their own minds: Lucrecia because her work required constant mental strain, and Vincent because his own mind refused to behave as a proper part of himself.

Without intellectual interaction, Vincent Valentine may have known of Lucrecia Crescent, but he had never truly met her, only an image with which he had carried on a brief and wild affair inside his head.

As for Lucrecia Crescent having known Vincent Valentine—well, if she had, Vincent thought, she had one over on him. But the notion almost made sense, he considered. After all, she had invested him with the very thing he had craved all his life: voices in his head.

They were both "so sorry," to have never met. How could you tell someone goodbye when you had never known them?

When Vincent told people that he atoned for his mistakes regarding the good doctor, it was simply the result of a failed computation on the part of the black box. His words, once again, refused to match his thoughts. Vincent atoned for the fact that he lived inside his own head and felt incapable of contributing anything useful to the world around him.

Vincent Valentine considered it nothing personal when he ignored the incessant blabbering of Yuffie Kisaragi. He did not find her particularly annoying, or particularly anything. Most of the time, he could not distinguish her from Barrett Wallace.

Yuffie existed as a constant presence that he had merely to grunt to placate. The twittering girl did not presume to desire any responses from him, and her words were often simple enough for him to keep up the appearance of consideration. The other members of AVALANCHE, he noticed, seemed incapable of being too quiet for her. In the same token, they expected him to be louder.

The two fragments often fell to the side, using one another in a manner that reminded him bizarrely of his relationship with Lucrecia Crescent.

How, then, Vincent wondered absently, staring at the windowsill on which the perpetrator sat, had Yuffie Kisaragi become the first girl he ever knew? But worse yet, how could she have forced him to know himself, to untangle and decipher the knotted resentments he had hidden for good reason?

And how, worst of all, now that he had known someone well enough for the first time, would he ever find the ability to tell her goodbye?

Clocks had the uncanny ability to tell Yuffie Kisaragi things that she most certainly did not want to know. This one flashed 5:00am in bright red digits over and over again, urging her to, "For the love of all that is Holy, drag your mangy ke-aister out of bed!"

With a resigned sigh, Yuffie obeyed, extricating her legs from tangled blankets. Another delightful day, she told herself. Just another delightful day.

Perparing for the day required little conscious effort on Yuffie's part, but the shower jarred her back to reality. Lunch with Pops. Stroll to the gym. Dinner. Breakfast. Try to connive Reeve into taking her out at some future date, not for any particular reason aside from the fact the she felt certain the smell of pagoda sweat was starting to knock a few of her much needed screws loose. Cancel a talk about economics. Schedule a talk about economics. Learn how to talk about economics. Figure out how to make an ordered list.

The disadvantage of gliding through mornings was that Yuffie had forgotten to comb her hair the past few days. Her thumb got caught in a jumbled rat's nest, and she swore loudly.

"Alright, Miss Kisaragi?" she heard her overtly nosey attendant call through the door.

"Yeah, yeah. Just a faulty brush."

"What?"

"I'm using the same brush the Mirage monster uses! Now, go. Be of use to someone not me." Yuffie heard nothing, but realized, without having to check, that the rather pudgy mother-in-law-type probably had not budged unless it was to gain a better vantage point from which to watch Yuffie's bathroom door.

Trying not to get annoyed, Yuffie rushed quickly through the rest of her routine, opened the bathroom to slide out, closed it again promptly, and grabbed a hair comb instead.

"Miss Kisaragi?"

Yuffie ignored her this time, raked the comb through her mussed hair—a few teeth broke off with a snap and bounced off her cheeks, prompting another bout of swearing—put it down, and once more resumed her jaunt out the bathroom door.

"Miss Kisaragi?" the attendant asked again.

"For the love of Da Chao, don't you know any other words?" Yuffie rolled her eyes.

The attendant said nothing, but Yuffie noticed a subtle downturn on the right corner of her mouth.

"Is there something I shouldn't forget today?" Yuffie asked. She looked around, trying to find something new and interesting about her hallway. She had been bored with it since she first remembered seeing it—when she was three—and wished her father would at least let her paint it something other than white. The only mildly interesting thing was the red carpet that lined the center of the hallway. Or, at least, it had once been red. Yuffie realized that it now resembled the skinned hide of a very dirty St. Bernard.

"Just lunch with Lord Godo," the woman said. Her voice, Yuffie thought uncharitably, was about as boring as the hallway. Would it kill her to have some emotion?

"How about breakfast?"

"Well, I was thinking I could talk to you before breakfast—"

"Oh noooooo…" Yuffie groaned. "Is this about your daughter again?"

"Well, yes," the attendant said. "I was hoping you could talk some sense into her. She's boarded herself up in that little house with that boyfriend of hers, and it's unseemly. What kind of boyfriend forces a girl to choose between him and her parents?"

Yuffie Kisaragi huffed. It was unfair for the attendant to constantly burden her with her family problems. The attendant insisted that Yuffie might be able to persuade her daughter away from one boyfriend or the next because the fifteen year-old girl "greatly respected The Great Ninja Yuffie," but as far as Yuffie could tell, the only thing that the she ever took from Yuffie's heart-to-hearts was that there were other boys out there. She would dump whichever one her mother thought was a bad influence at the time, only to run into another's arms.

Really, Yuffie thought, how did a fifteen year-old girl find so many boys in Wutai? Yuffie had never even had a date. And these boys, sure there were a few seditious characters and drug addicts among them, but they weren't all bad.

"Why are you always asking me again, Leona?" Yuffie asked with a sigh. "It's not like I have any experience with boys or listening to reason."

"That's why she listens to you, I think," Leona insisted, trying to stand tall on feet too small for her body. "You're objective."

That was one way of putting it.

"Fine." Yuffie sighed. "I'll go track her down after lunch with Godo. Can I go to the gym now?"

"Oh, thank you, Miss Kisaragi!" Leona gushed, her tiny black eyes watering with gratitude. "I'm really worried this time. I know you think I over-react, but this is so much worse. I can tell!"

Which, of course, was something the woman always said.

"Sure, sure," Yuffie dismissed, edging away from the gushing attendant and down the narrow hall toward the door.

Occasionally one can break a promise to one's father for a legitimate reason. One such reason might be breaking your back, or losing your way in a snow storm, or, as Yuffie's case stood, the sound of a screaming girl heard over treetops on the path toward said father's pagoda.

After having worked up a modest lather running at the gym, Yuffie had decided to take her time walking to lunch with her father rather than engage in some other time-consuming activity. The new trees that lined the path to the pagoda left Yuffie in the mood for reminiscing and considering her future all at once.

Greenery settled her mind comfortably, making her think of investing time in a comfortable intellectual pursuit for a change. Traveling and saving the world had left her little time to exercise mental faculties, and the thought of 'economics,' of all things, had snuck up on her this morning. Now, math probably was not her forte, but maybe she could be a philosopher or a novelist or a painter or a scientist! Yeah. A scientist! That was nice and intellectual. Nevermind about the math. She'd figure that out later.

Birds squawked, greeting the spring morning with renewed eagerness and bright optimism to properly complement Yuffie's more-than-likely-pointless train of thought. An appropriate finch song lulled her into a pacified state as her mind broached the possibility of investing her energy into theatre.

When it seemed that the forest itself had emitted a shrill shriek, Yuffie felt herself nearly topple forward in alarm. The next scream, then, actually righted her. With a start, Yuffie thundered after it. Traveling with AVALANCHE and working at the WRO had taught her mind to pinpoint sounds—threatening sounds in particular.

She directed her motion to a small hutch she knew stood on the outskirts of the forest. The sounds had produced a picture of it in her mind. The white paper walls stood tall, protected by the over-arching branches of bonsai trees.

Yuffie's mind clenched and unclenched around the image. Trees would part a moment only to reveal more trees. All of her training and practice at careening blindly and swiftly had not prepared her for how long this forest had become. After a few more bursts of terror erupting and growing louder, Yuffie felt cold. The screams definitely came from a girl about her age. For the love of all that is holy, what would anyone want to hurt a girl like her for? Sure, she could be annoying, but to make her scream, she thought, seemed a bit much.

Where had all these trees come from? She swore she could not remember passing them on the way up the path before. Thankfully, the screams seemed too like the trees. They continued and would not stop. Don't stop screaming, Kid, Yuffie thought, don't stop.

Yuffie's foot caught an awkwardly placed tree root, sending her sprawling face down in the earth. She felt flecks of grit weave between her teeth, making her mouth dry and uncomfortable. Traction on the ground rubbed her chin raw. Her hand ran across the scrape, pulling away drops of red blood. Swearing, Yuffie scrambled back to her feet.

The sudden still quiet in the air made her freeze mid-scramble. The screaming had stopped.

With a mechanical numbness, The Great Kisaragi wiped her hands on her thighs, leaving palm-shaped red stains on her khaki shorts. She would have noticed and stopped herself under any other circumstances. She would have berated herself for staining a perfectly good pair of shorts—no matter how tattered and dusty—but all she could think about was the sudden intensity of the silence squeezing around her skull.

Quickly, without bothering to check her footing, Yuffie lumbered forward. Her surroundings suddenly seemed loud. The finch song turned into embarrassed squawking. The smooth stones under her feet sounded like pieces of her feet breaking off. Her chest hammered in her ribs like pressured bullets of shower water in the morning.

And suddenly, the forest seemed too short.

When the foliage cleared a straight path toward the white paper house, Yuffie wished that there had been more trees. She wished that she would have arrived later still. She thought that, if Da Chao were truly a loving god, she would never get there at all. If she could not come before the screaming had stopped, she should get lost in the trees and never break free again.

What was the point of struggling against something that had already happened?

Yet she kept walking, nearly running. She stumbled more than when she had been traveling urgently, with the weight of the screams spurring her forward like swift kicks to her rear end. She wanted those screams to start up again, to make her fall and taste the minerals.

Maybe she's just unconscious? But Yuffie cut herself off, for it led to contemplating the implications of the sound she did not hear. New scents assailed her nostrils. Fresh metal. Paint? Salt. Saline. And something too sweet and too repulsive to characterize until she saw it, streaked across the front door.

How many times had she thought of that color red that day? The digits on the clock. The old rug in the hall. She ticked off the obvious ones in her head. But neither of those seemed to specifically match except for the hand-shaped prints on her shorts, the red that still trickled from her chin. But the red that painted the door could not be the same exact red as the red on Yuffie's chin because Yuffie's chin had been lost in the forest when this particular red had been smeared across this particular door.

No, the Kisaragi girl thought as she approached the door, she had had nothing to do with that red. But the tightening of her fist promised that soon, very soon, she would.