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“I’ve got your boss, come to Kalm if you want him,” Yuffie said casually into the PHS, then after a second added, “That kinda sounded like a threat, huh? Wasn’t meant as one. Just come gather up your jerk, ‘kay?”
“What the hell? Is this the Wutai brat? How the fuck are you—”
Yuffie switched the PHS off and kicked back in her seat, glancing out the window at where Meteor was getting ever so close to Midgar across the plains. So wherever Reeve was, he was with the Turks. Good to know, a few extra sets of hands would make it easier to lug her prize away before Barret could catch wind of what she was doing and shout her head off about letting the bastards who kidnapped Marlene into the same house as her. For all she knew the countdown to that had already begun; it’d be totally crazy of Barret to be checking in on his daughter in the middle of assaulting the Northern Crater, but he was such a doting daddy that she wouldn’t put it past him.
Heck, if the story she’d heard from Cid was true then Barret’d stared at his PHS as they fell back down from space so the second he got a clear connection he could call and get Marlene excited over where he’d been. The trek down to Sephiroth would be nothing in comparison.
He could just suck it up though, because it wasn’t like she could just trust any random hospital with the presumed-dead leader of Shinra Inc. There were way too many people who’d want that ‘presumed’ to turn into ‘absotively posilutely 100% kaput’ and she’d gone to way too much trouble retrieving his barbecued ass to let that happen. So, instead of meeting up with Cloud the way she was supposed to, she’d hijacked that last evac helicopter and forced it to drop the two of them off near the closest safehouse she knew of. It was hardly her fault that happened to be the same one Marlene and Elmyra were staying in.
Maybe it would have been better to go further and avoid the whole issue. It wasn’t like being within sight-range of Meteorfall ground zero felt like the most secure place to keep a guy in critical condition. But she knew that was just dummy-thoughts, feeling like it mattered; if the rest of the guys weren’t able to stop Meteor before it hit then nowhere in the world was gonna be safe.
“So they’ve got to win,” she told Rufus’ sleeping body on the bed beside her as she tossed another Cure3 at him to keep him stabilized, “’Cause no way am I gonna have climbed down a freaking skyscraper carrying your heavy butt just to get squished now! I swear, whole team of bodyguards and somehow it’s the pretty girl with the leg brace who’s gotta yank you out of the rubble, what’s with that? You should totally pay me those slackers’ salaries for the month, you know, I’ll be happy to take it in materia instead of gil!”
He didn’t respond, as he hadn’t responded to anything since his rescue beyond giving the occasional pained groan when he was jostled, but that was fine. It wasn’t like she was interested in chatting with the President of Shinra, of all stupid people, anyway.
Since it would be awhile before he needed a magical boost to his healing again she tossed herself out of her chair and dug a box of tea out of the bottom of her bag. She didn’t pull it out often, it felt too much like saying she was homesick to not just drink the pisswater the rest of the world called tea and say that it was fine, but every time they stopped back home she’d find the contents refreshed the next time she opened it up even if she swore she hadn’t taken her attention off her bag for a second. She thought it was Gorky, the old fussbudget, because the only other likely option was her dad and that would just be weird.
The world was hours away from ending though, and she was a bajillion miles away from Wutai and just as far away from her friends, and nobody would think less of her if she could use some of the comforts of home.
“If you want some you better wake up and say so now, buster, or else you’ll be missing out!” she chirped at Rufus, waving the box under his nose. “No way you’re getting another chance to drink the good stuff, you know, there ain’t nobody in Wutai who’s going to serve it to vacationing Shinra bastards! Nothing? Just gonna sleep? Your loss!”
She bounced downstairs to grab the kettle she knew she’d spotted in the kitchen. She was a little less sure there was an actual teapot anywhere, but hey, she was resourceful, she’d work something out.
The water was just starting to boil and the pot that did indeed exist was readied when she heard the door burst open and peeked out her head to see Reeve and the Turks all streaming in. “Whoa, that was quick, were you guys close by? You do get that if you were still in Midgar that was real dumb, right? Like, I only thought I was saving one member of Shinra here!”
“Yo, brat!” Reno was on her by the time she’d finished talking, raising an arm to stretch across her clavical and push her back as he moved, like he’d be clotheslining her if he was just using more speed and force, but since he wasn’t she allowed him to shove her back until her knees hit one of the kitchen chairs behind her and she plopped down into it, grinning cheekily up at him. “What the hell did you mean, you have our boss? The top three floors of the building were completely fucking impossible to get into, you think we didn’t check that?”
“Hey, not my fault if you suck at your job, dude! Hey, Reeve? Reeve!” She leaned sideways so she could see him still standing awkwardly in the living room, looking like he wanted to interrupt this so-far pretty mild interrogation but wasn’t sure he could, “Can you pleeeeaaase fill up my teapot for me? Tea’s already in there, and it’d be nice if it’s ready for me to drink when this whole ‘Rarrrr, how dare you make sure our boss is safe and not dead like the super awesome hero you are, this pisses me off for some reason!’ thing is over.”
“I’m not fucking pissed off that he’s alive!” Reno burst out after a moment of spluttering, “I’m just— what the hell—”
“How?” Rude interrupted mildly as he stepped into the doorway. Very close to literally, and Yuffie couldn’t help wondering whether he’d notice it if she was ever able to sneak up on him when he was sleeping and slip lifts on his shoes to raise him that last tiny fraction of an inch to make door frames completely too small for him.
“I dunno, how’s he still alive?” she asked, nodding past him to the figures still standing in the other room. “Don’t think I don’t see you there, Tseng! Gawd, Elena, wasn’t the whole reason you were so ragey at us all the time because you thought we did in your boss? You wouldn’t even accept the sisterly bond of being strung up on a mountain by a giant perve with me because you were so pissed off, and he was alive the whole time? Did you just, like, never tell her we weren’t the ones that skewered you?”
The whole time she rambled Rude was still staring steadily at her, expressionless behind his shades, and she found herself starting to squirm in a way that Reno’s attempts at looming couldn’t even begin to cause, and finally she stopped the bullshit with a heavy sigh and said, “Fine. After I was done helping out with evacuating the rest of the city I went back up into the tower, blew out a window on the 65th floor, and scaled up the outside of the building until I made it to the hole Diamond left. I had to make sure, you know? If there was any chance he wasn’t totally fried and was left up there he’d be the first one to go if Cloud and the guys cut things a little too close, so… Anyway, I found him, tied him to my back, and rappelled down the side of the tower with him, then held a kunai to the guy driving the helicopter’s neck until he dropped us where I could make sure none of his enemies could get at him until I had a chance to pass him over to you overly aggressive jerkfaces!” She shot fingerguns at Rude and Reno both, then one more set at Reeve so he wouldn’t feel left out being the only one in the room not to get them, and brightly finished off, “Sooo long story short, I’m super awesome, sucks to be you when he wakes up and learns who his savior is.”
“Why?” was Rude’s only response, taking the wind straight out of her sails. The guy did not leave much room for banter, the whole thing would be a lot more fun if Reno hadn’t let him take over asking the questions.
Fine. He wanted serious Yuffie? She’d give him serious Yuffie. “Look, you know who I am, right? Not just, like, that cool ninja chick who hangs out with Cloud kicking your butts, but who I am? You get that I’m somebody who would’ve have about a kajillion lessons on leadership and global politics and all that garbage growing up? I might want Shinra the hell out of Wutai, but I don’t want to destabilize the whole world to get it, and Rufus might be a total asshole half the time but that’s what him dying when there isn’t an heir in place would do. Heck, it took Scarlet and Heidegger, like, ten minutes to go nuts trying to grab power when they hadn’t even seen a body.” She shrugged, “If there was any chance he was alive, he had to be found.”
“That is… surprisingly mature of you, Yuffie,” Reeve finally broke in, nudging Reno away from looming over her at last and placing a cup of tea into her hands. She was pretty sure it hadn’t brewed long enough, unless she’d lost track of time while she was talking which she definitely could do, but it was a nice enough gesture that she accepted it to not be a jerk about it.
“Yeah, well, the great Yuffie can be magnanimous when she wants to, you know,” and took having her space back to push herself up to her feet again. She raised an eyebrow at Reeve when she saw that he’d already poured himself his own cup of tea, without even asking, but waved to the pot and said to the rest of the group, “Welp, feel free to grab a cup if you want one, though if everyone does we’ll need to make another pot. Wasn’t enough to tempt your boss into waking up, but it is the good stuff; might as well have something warm in our bellies if the planet’s about to blow up right?”
She wouldn’t have expected Reno to be the first one to wander over to the pot, but she would have been wrong. While she stared in horror at him pouring an ungodly amount of sugar into his cup Tseng’s voice drifted in from the living room, “Miss Kisaragi, where is Rufus?”
“Huh? Uh…” she shook off the urge to grab the cup out of Reno’s hand and snap at him that he had to find baggies to make himself pisswater if that’s how he was going to treat his tea, and finally wrapped her mind around the question, “Oh, he’d sleeping upstairs, first bedroom on the right. I better warn you though, he’s alive but he’s not pretty right now, I’ve been casting cures on him every half-hour but half his skin still looks char-broiled.”
Tseng was gone up the stairs before she’d even finished speaking, but she shrugged it off. He couldn’t say she hadn’t tried to warn him.
Then three seconds later she heard a cry of “Yuffie!” from upstairs, and was shoving her way out of the kitchen under Rude’s arm and up the stairs like a shot. Barret absolutely was gonna throttle her if the stupid leader of the stupid Turks couldn’t follow one simple direction and Marlene had just had her kidnapper barge in on her in the next room past Rufus’.
“I said first bedroom on the right you dumbass, fir—” she was already saying as she burst in the door, only for the words to be cut short when she couldn’t stop her mouth from hanging open at the brilliant green light streaming in from the window.
“Look!” Marlene was saying, grabbing at her hand and yanking her towards the window, pointing at where the menacing shape of Meteor in the distance was suddenly being drilled apart by massive tendrils of the lifestream. “Look, Yuffie, it’s gonna be okay!”
“It is. It is! Of course it is!” She grabbed Marlene up in her arms and whirled her in a circle, a wild whooping laugh escaping her as she spun them both dizzy in celebration. Cloud had done it, they’d all done it! “Everything will be okay!”
Then she settled back at the window, leaning far out it like somehow being that little bit closer would make the view better. After a moment she twisted her head around, spotting Tseng leaning on the frame of the next window over, the others down below all gathered outside the front door. Even Elmyra had come down to join them, apparently unphased by the surprise visitors when there was something so much more important going on.
The planet was going to be okay. And maybe, just maybe, she’d made it so that power vacuum wasn’t going to form and the people could be too.
Maybe this was going to be a perfect happy ending, and all thanks to Yuffie Kisaragi, ninja extraordinaire, with just a little help from her talented lackeys.