They’d landed in Traverse town by airship, gummi ship, fighter plane; Yuffie didn’t even know, didn’t even care. The sky was filled with fire. The streets were filled with eyes. And then the sky went grey and the streets went darker and all they had was the beginning of a survival attempt.

Aerith was calm because the cafe had food and the hotel had beds, and as long as she had her healing magic, a few scratches along the way wouldn’t hurt, right? Cid just grunted a lot. And Squalleon was quiet, because Squall was always the most reminiscent of a rock.

And Yuffie, well, she was Yuffie -- swinging between corner-angst and stealing granola bars from the cafe when she didn’t really need to steal anyway and chasing after moogles because they ran pretty fast and it was pretty fun.

But the first few days, they all glanced over shoulders every other minute. Was the first one really the safe district? Would the locks on the hotel doors hold? It went without saying that, five to one, the whole place would blow up in bursts of violet darkness and smoky black, and Cid kept a ship outside this one set of doors, always, because you couldn’t be too sure.

Aerith talked about the future too much. Painting walls, making something of that little second-district house.

She’d started the little postcard contest with that ludicrous old hat-shaped mailbox, boosting morale or something, she’d said. Still, five, no, ten to one, Yuffie said with a shrug, we have no future, we’re just going to die in this stupid town.

Which made Aerith put down her paints and brushes and the blank postcards and all. Or maybe she’d dropped the brush, because a long blue streak went across the fanned out cards, but Yuffie wasn’t really sorry because it was all stupid anyway. And she turned to leave, but Aerith grabbed her arm and frowned, don’t say things like that.

She told Squall, of course. Which was why Yuffie was slumped on the Accessory Shop sofa with folded arms and narrowed eyes, and Squall was hovering over her, no longer a rock, but a mountain in the shape of a man with leather pants and an oversized necklace. And Yuffie said so, too, though maybe the idea was more coherent in her thoughts, and Cid snorted, and Squall’s passive expression became a glare before fading back to passive like always, but moments later he was sitting beside her.

“There will always,” he said, “be a future.”

“And what a future it is,” Yuffie muttered.

And then they were off in the third district, taking out their anger on Shadows and Soldiers and those giant big ones that probably ate too much heartless candy, even if Squall didn’t find the idea funny and told her to call him Leon for the tenth time that day alone — she liked to count, just so she could lose track. She with her stars and he with his macho hybrid gunblade, bam bam bam, clink clink clink, stab, slice, victory, then the second district, leaping from bench to bench and taking daredevil jumps from the balcony’s edge (but that was just Yuffie, Squall took the stairs,) and then the hotel, keeping out the heartless and killing the monsters under the bed, partially in the interest of safety, but mostly in the interest of being alone, and Yuffie decided the future didn’t scare her nearly as much as the amount of cologne Squall took to wearing each day, and that was the truth.

- - -

For Constance Greene

Sorry about the giant textblocks, especially with the ending. xD; Yuffie's rambling is hard to cut into smaller chunks.