#spec b

There was no way. 

Absolutely. No. Fucking. Way. 

For a moment, Yuffie just watched him, a bright smile slowly spreading across her face as it became certain in her mind - she knew that melody. Oh. This was just about the best day ever, or evening, whatever. It was the best time she could have asked for.

“I knew it, I’m famous.” The grin on her face was something. As if all the firework festivals had come at once. 

Sitting down without ceremony, the young Shinobi plopped onto the floor, crossed her legs and smiled. “You know, in another lifetime I would have been an idol.” While she might sound like she’d joking, no, Yuffie was fully convinced of it. If she’d spent as much train training for it as she did to be a Shinobi it would have been a certainty. 

❛  what  a  friendly  face  you  got  there.  ❜

a  gloved  hand  maneuvered  itself  across  the  keypad  presented  by  the  vending  machine  he  was  currently  trying  to  get  a  bottled  drink  from.  it  didn’t  take  long  for  the  machine  to  register  his  input  and  deposit  the  bottled  carbonated  drink,  taking  a  hold  of  it  and  loosening  the  cap.

❛  is  that  how  you  greet  everyone  or  do  you  particularly  hate  me  ??  ❜

His words crashed over her life a wave. He was trying, that she understood….but the idea that people couldn’t even relate to what she was going through just made it feel worse. She pulled her legs closer to herself, arms wrapped around them…oh, the conversation made her feel small. “But you can’t relate.” She would happily shrink away into nothing if it got her out of it but he was trying. She didn’t have it in her to punish him by shutting the conversation down right there and then.

Instead, she at least attempted to explain. “Maybe it’s better if people don't know.” What were they going to do with the information? “There’s nothing anyone can do to help. There’s nothing anyone can say that changes it. It just changes the way they look at you.” The latter she didn’t want, she was okay being the happy one. People didn’t look at you with pity, they didn’t tiptoe around you. “Then they have to live with knowing what happened to you, and they have all these weird feelings about it. It’s just better you don't poison them with it too.” 

Swallowing the lump in her throat, she took a shaking breath. Dark brown eyes focused downwards, on a point miles below the floor. “Sometimes I feel like I live in a snowglobe…” a strange analogy, but one Yuffie felt like it fit. She had one as a kid, that she would shake every time she walked in and out of her room. Maybe this was karma for it? “People go past me and everything gets shaken up but you never really…” were part of anything or had control over it. 

What was she meant to say? Anything encouraging that Yuffie had to say came with caveats. Then again, those caveats were the truth of the situation, and Cloud didn’t seem like the kind of person that wanted platitudes and for truth to be minimised or debated. It didn’t change the situation, it was some strange coping mechanism that he was far too smart to fall for. 

Instead. Yuffie nodded her head in quiet agreement. 

Sometimes all of this did feel like a nightmare. Something cold coiled its way around her heart, pulled her chest tight as she swallowed the developing lump in her throat. “People think the worst nightmares are made up but they’re not.” No. The worst ones were memories. Where you replayed them, searching for fault, for your own faults, for things you could have done, for blame, for some kind of reason so you could cling to sanity in the waking world. 

Height Comparison | Accepting

It felt judgmental…though then again, a lot of things did to her. Call it being oversensitive, but it wasn’t like she hadn’t met her fairshare of judgemental people in her life. Her knee jerk reaction was to dismiss his comment with a loud “pfft,” a wave of her hand and a small roll of her eyes. “Judge me all you want, I'm hilarious.” 

That was the thing, people judged all the time. She knew people judged her, Cloud wouldn’t be first nor the last. People looked at her and they saw what they wanted to, and sometimes, Yuffie was happy enough to let that happen. Occasionally, it bothered her, there were fleeting thoughts about how she kinda wished someone could see through it, that it didn’t feel like she was hauling some kind of secret world around with her, but wishes were for children. While Yuffie acted childish, she was grown enough to know that wishes were just fancy thoughts. Reality wasn’t that kind. 

“You haven’t?” She sounded surprised. 

Had he really never? 

It seemed like the kind of thing every teenager had done, even Yuffie…especially Yuffie. 

A bright smile spread across her face, a nefarious plan taking hold as she raced through her own mind. Oh yes. This was going to be fantastic. 

“Alright. Then we do it.” Oh happy days. “Then we are going to have a sleepover, and we will get snacks and I can tell ghost stories!” Well. The girls in the temple had always tried to get each other too scared to sleep.