Thanks again to thegreathippothief. Never feel bad about giving me your honest opinion. I went back and tried to clear up a bit more, but I'm not so sure how much I improved it.

White Candle

In the end, Vincent did not open his weapon smith in Mideel; he opened it in Wutai.

Reeve, though shocked by his pronouncement, had agreed that this decision better served to carpet the globe with WRO representatives in Yuffie's temporary—he still refused to classify it otherwise—absence.

And, true to his word, Vincent did not travel to Edge to visit Yuffie at the hospital. Instead, he went to Ridges to visit Xie. Every day.

137 screeched open. She no longer asked him to stop at the door. He always answered "Thursday" regardless.

The white light had stopped bothering his eyes as well. He strode easily over to the pin-striped mattress and tucked the soggy paper bag he had been carrying into her lap. She always sat the same way with one leg dangling over the edge of the bed and the other foot tucked underneath. He wondered if she moved.

After he backed into 'the red chair,' she jammed her thin fingers into the bag and pulled out handfuls of wet bow tie pasta. "You brought the good stuff again, Dear. The cooks at this establishment could learn something from you."

As usual, he did not bother to tell her that the contents had come from a blue cardboard box. He had a feeling she knew anyway.

"How's the goat?" she asked, the olives twitching in her eye sockets.

She referred to Godo. Vincent had started calling Lord Godo his pet goat after the first several visits in which she inevitably degenerated into a screaming mess of black hair. But by calling him a goat, Vincent could relay information about Xie Kisaragi's husband without debilitating her.

Sometimes she ended up addressing Vincent as Godo. He did not mind so much. He was not particularly partial to the name Vincent in any case.

"He's stopped moping for the most part." Vincent shrugged. "I've managed to get the staff to clean up his room. I have to prod him to sign papers, but at least he gets it done."

"I still say it's odd to keep a goat inside," she said breezily, shoving a kernel of pasta up her left nostril. "What does he think about it?"

"I force him out sometimes." Vincent leaned against the wall. "He puts on a brave face for the locals because I tell him he looks like a decaying corpse if he doesn't."

"Well at least he responds well to insults. It's an admirable quality for a goat to have."

Valentine slid into a cross-legged sitting position. Light caught the bronze of his boots and bolted for Xie's irises. She turned up her nose and covered her eyes, smearing pasta lint across her forehead in the process.

"Those boots of yours are ghastly, Mister Mizugo," she hissed. "Have you no common courtesy?"

"Hn."

"Don't you 'Hn' me, Sir! I thought we'd moved beyond that. Remember, each sentence requires a subject and a verb. 'Hn' is neither. Try again."

Xie Kisaragi still failed to remind him of Yuffie. She liked fried eggs and blue box pasta noodles. She refused to look herself in the mirror. She had black hair and pale skin.

Vincent thought he knew both of them a lot better than that.

"I still miss her," he confessed. 'Yuffie' was another name he could not utter without consequences, but she never bothered to ask for it.

Paper crinkled. A large swallowing noise followed, but Xie did not say anything.

The difference struck him when she remained silent. She let him struggle through his words, only stopping him to comment on innocuous things like the goat in the house, or to coax him forward. She never lingered over the details, and she illustrated his words with pictures in her eyes and on the white walls to make sure the translation came through properly.

She was, as Yuffie had put it, 'his very own Vincent Valentine.'

He tried to remember when he had realized that the only people whom he could carry on a long conversation with were too mentally maladjusted to live outside of a white-walled prison. He tried to remember when he had realized that said conversations were primarily one-sided—

He tried to remember when it had stopped bothering him. Or rather, had it ever bothered him to begin with?

"Hey Godo, did you send the missive I asked you to?"

"Yes," he nodded, sighing as his clarity filtered away through the dark square between the door and the wall.

"Well?" she coaxed, upending the rest of the pasta bag into her long black hair.

Vincent heaved himself up into a standing position and crossed the space between them. "President Shinra won't be attending the wedding. He's preparing for a war." He plucked a couple sticky kernels of pasta from her hair.

"No touching the bride before the wedding!" Xie batted his heavy hand from her hair, narrowing her filmed eyes. "That's odd though. I wonder who he's planning to go to war with now."

"Gold Saucer?" Vincent offered.

"That's idiotic. Everyone loves Gold Saucer."

"You're right," Vincent apologized. "It would never happen."

"That's like saying he'd go to war with Wutai!"

"I know," Vincent nodded distantly. "It's insane. Or at least, you must have thought so at the time."

"I demand that you start making sense immediately, Boy!" Xie roared haughtily, brandishing a fistful of pasta in his face. She lowered her arms to her lap and folded her hands in her cotton gown.

"Now tell me, have you visited your mother's grave?" Her voice tightened so much that Vincent could envision tossing marbles against it and watching them ricochet back.

"No." Valentine turned to the wall on his right and tucked his hand into his cape collar for a folded piece of paper.

"And why not?" Xie's voice droned behind him. "Don't you think she misses you? It must be dark in that coffin all alone."

From experience, Vincent knew it was.

"If she thought she would miss me, she wouldn't have killed herself." He unfolded the paper with his claw and flattened the creases with his human thumb. He stared blankly at the color for several long moments, and almost did not catch the titter of Xie's response.

"Sometimes mothers don't have a choice," she said in her wilted, almost conscious voice.

Instead of responding verbally, Vincent pulled two thumb tacks from his front right pants pocket and fastened the paper to the center of the wall to the left of Xie Kisaragi. He took a step back and stared.

A cluster of stick-drawing trees in yellow, blue, and purple plastered the wall. Most of the sketches were in paint and creased both laterally and horizontally down the middle. Flecks of color glittered incongruously in the margins, and the resulting effect was as overwhelming as the walls in Highwind's guest room had been before Yuffie white-rolled them.

"Oh, they're trees!" Xie exclaimed; she had not recognized the shape before Vincent added the newest one. The newest one was certainly different: not because it was more detailed, or the shape well-defined. No, all of the drawings looked like print-roll replicas.

The newest painting, occupying the center of the wall at a four-corner annex of yellow and purple trees, was drawn entirely in green.

It took Vincent several moments, in his sudden daze, to remember that his self-prescribed lunch break would end soon.

"I—I'll see you tomorrow, Lady," he said after deciding to make for the door.

"Don't you mean next Thursday, Mizugo?"

"Of course," he said collecting himself. He bowed his head once respectfully, lowering the fold of his rumpled cape to flash a smile—though he realized that the corners of his mouth had not lifted considerably—before sliding through the dark crack and away from the light.

Though he left more unsettled than usual, Vincent remembered to inspect the images in his head when he waved goodbye to number 137. The dark lettering jutted out nosily, eager for the result of the interrogation.

"No," he told the numbers. "It won't matter to me at all if I don't see Xie tomorrow."

The numbers slipped into the door satisfied. He would be back around noon with three fried eggs.

-

He had grown to regret his decision to request construction of a new building for his weapon smith. At the time, he had wanted to shirk the plague of dust and secrets, but now the shine of glass counter made him miss the dirt. He lazily perused the garish brown and red wood beams. The luster made them look plastic: like they belonged in the theme park Wutai had become in reputation.

Coincidentally, Vincent rarely received any tourists for customers. Travelers maybe, but not tourists. The reason? Vincent did not sell shuriken or any other traditional Wutainese weaponry.

He sold handguns for the most part. .38 mm rounds glittered in a standing line in the display case under the register. Semi-automatics wreathed the room under glass panels: exemplary sell-ables.

Old Shinra-issue swords, fisherman spears, black-ball maces, brass knuckles, crystal combs, and even the occasional high-amp megaphone littered the exposed spaces in between. He kept an ample supply of pepper spray on the counter to combat the irony.

Mr. Florette, naturally, did not get the joke.

The brass bell had tinkled five hours into opening day. The burly man had bounded across the room and slugged Vincent's lower jaw with swollen knuckles. It hurt even less than Yuffie's blue stone had when it had bounced uselessly off the center of his forehead.

The intruder had then proceeded to inform Vincent that he had 'some nerve selling instruments of murder in Wutai.'

Vincent had only gazed with lidded eyes at his bronze claw tickling the counter and waited for Mr. Florette to finish his tirade. He had not expected anyone else to get it, least of all an emotionally injured man, but Vincent was done living in a box and hoping that problems would go away if he did nothing. In reality, living in a box made problems worse.

Like before, he refused to take responsibility.

When Mr. Florette had tired of waiting for an apology, he had sputtered off like a broken gasket and waddled back out the front door. It was the last condemnation Vincent ever received. It was also the last visit that had sparked any sort of emotion whatsoever.

Keeping shop had its lonely elements. Several patrons asked him for a job at one point or another, and though Vincent could afford to pay them, he always turned them down, using the excuse that he had promised the job to someone else. Which, of course he had, but that was a pithy justification, and he knew it. Truthfully, Wutai had changed him, but it had not changed him enough to rewrite his gut craving for solitude.

Except for busy weekends, shoppers came sparingly. Vincent used to think that he liked to be alone because he could not communicate. But maybe Vincent just liked to be alone.

Vincent's greediest customer, Evening, fluttered into the shop six hours after he returned from his lunch break with Lady Xie Kisaragi, reminding him to close his doors. Locks clicked around a red-handled key, and the lamplight faded.

Still thinking about the color of the tree in Xie Kisaragi's newest cell painting, Vincent's feet brushed off the stone stoop and dragged him into the forest around Godo Kisaragi's pagoda. The growth of the trees stretched taller every day. His acute eyesight allowed him to see the difference the same way it allowed him to see wrinkles cropping up on faces as they appeared. Despite these incidental changes, Vincent still recognized his favorite tree: the one with the insufferably stretching maple bow that he had the habit of picturing Yuffie perched upon.

With his head resting against it, he stretched down to sit at the roots. His limbs felt as hollow and aching as snapped lumber. Wind passed through his hair, and he heard Yuffie telling him over and over again that everything would be alright because he was sitting under the best tree in the best forest in the world.

Everything would be alright because he was in Wutai: where it should not have begun, and where it may never end.

Reeve, true to his word, sent him updates on Yuffie's condition via WRO operatives visiting Wutai. The envelopes came stuffed with drawings of trees in Yuffie's new favorite colors. Vincent had asked Reeve to stop sending them; they were just like the tattered letters in Yuffie's old home. The commissioner insisted, however, and he had called Vincent to tell him so, begging that Yuffie demanded he get them. He decided to hang them in Xie's room to avoid fixating.

Funny how that logic failed him.

He wondered how Yuffie Kisaragi could sort out the colors in her head and how Xie Kisaragi could name the shapes in her own, when his objects produced nothing but white noise and dirt caked under his earth-scratching fingernails.

But maybe that's all it ever was, Vincent thought: white noise, dirt, and green trees. The rest of the world be damned. Valentine curled his hand around the tree moss and beat his fist against the trunk. He did not want to think that way anymore. There were things inside his head and people in the world, and try as he might, he could not wish either of them away.

He should not want to either.

-

Godo Kisaragi sat on his golden floor mat, glaring obstinately at the crime report resting on his right knee. He sucked at his tongue, bored and irritated by the sir name that headed every violence record that made its way to the top of the pagoda. After the assault on the royal establishment that Vincent Valentine had warned him about—not much of an assault after all of the gods had prepared themselves—he had seen to the incarceration of the three family heads. Attacks on tourists had grown sloppier and easier to trace, but they still occurred with maddening frequency. Godo had begun to suspect that the family had access to some new-fangled cell-replicating technology.

Either that or the Sven women were very busy indeed.

His sleek black PHS shuddered next to his sandal. The Lord of Wutai glared at it for several moments and contemplated heaving it down the stairs instead of answering. Only one person used his personal number anymore. The rest came to visit him, or first contacted Shake, whose time lately had been delegated to secretarial work.

Reluctantly, he lifted it to his face in disgust and jabbed the "Answer" button.

"What do you want, Valentine?" he dressed his voice in his best go-boil-your-tongue-in-Da-Chao's-hot-spring tone.

"I was considering dinner," he answered gruffly.

"Well don't let me keep you, then," Godo retorted. "I imagine it takes a great deal of food to maintain enough energy to stick your great wide nose in my business every day. If it's a very critical matter, don't waste your time talking."

"Do you mind meeting me at Turtle's Paradise in an hour?"

"I don't know what gave you the impression, but I don't date men." Godo felt his color darken.

"You need to go out more, Lord Kisaragi." Vincent ignored the jibe. "You'll start to get fat if you sit in that pagoda all day eating nothing but rice. I bet your skin will fall off, too, without proper vitamins."

Not noticing it, Godo pulled himself to his feet, waving his fist at no one in particular. Crime reports floated lazily to the floor with a flutter like a spinning shuriken. "Don't you dare talk to me like that! I only let you keep that shop of yours out of the goodness of my heart. One more word out of you, and I'll close that thing down, do you hear me? Where did you even learn to talk to me like that? I always took you for a mild-mannered man, but no more! You hear me, Valentine? No more!"

"Excellent," the man's bored voice continued, undeterred. "I'll expect you to pick up the tab then."

"Did you even listen to a word I—?"

Click.

Then Lord Godo did chuck his PHS down the stairs. After which, he proceeded to roar at the gold rug and toss empty red rice bowls against the walls.

Confound Vincent Valentine. Only Yuffie had permission to push his buttons like a four year-old with a tuning fork. She had passed vital information on to Midgarians, interfering with national security in the process. If she were not indisposed, he would wring her ruddy chicken neck. In one final childish display, Godo stubbed his toe against the rug and snorted.

Rage spent, he ambled to the closet, tripping over piles of dry rice in search of his teal town robe. Upon procuring it, he folded back down on his creaking joints and stacked the empty bowls together before straightening out the rumpled floor rug.

The last of the day's papers stood in the corner ready to pick up and hand in to Shake. He busied himself with properly lining up the corners to avoid thinking about the thing that bothered him the most about his conversations with Vincent.

As much as he roared, hissed, and sputtered, as much as he would deny it if any curious soul ever enquired, it felt good to get that worked up again. It made him hope, just a little, that those friends of Yuffie's knew what the hell they were doing.

He struggled with a stiff smile and tottered down the stairs.

-

Valentine watched the old man—who, in reality, was slightly younger than himself—grip his glass of brandy tightly as he lifted it to his lips. He knew the silence made the Lord of Wutai uncomfortable, but Vincent felt disinclined to break it purely for the benefit of his gracious patron.

Turtle's Paradise provided a cozy evening atmosphere. Darkness made it difficult for normal humans to see. The rich scent of imported pine wood weaved like grease in Vincent's skin. Red lacquer graced both the bar and the table frames. A lit white candle dotted the center space of each booth. Vincent waved a bronze digit over the flame and watched soot leave lipstick-mark kisses.

"Would you not do that?" Godo scratched his shoulder irritably. "It's creepy."

Vincent rested his clawed arm on the table with a swish and a clink. He ruffled his menu, searching out the lowest priced item. Taste had never numbered high on his priority list—less so after Yuffie's burnt eggs.

"Why do I have to suffer through this then?" Godo cleared his throat. "You seem perfectly content to just stare at your menu and ignore me. It's a disgrace to drag me out to a pop tent like this when I have so much work to do. Not that I'm ungrateful, but this 'you warned me' thing is getting thin. I should forget about it by tomorrow and treat you like a peasant again."

Several moments of silence followed before Vincent decided that Godo had finished his rant. "I didn't want to be alone tonight."

Godo blinked slowly—at least once, and Vincent guessed he blinked again after that, but he had already buried his face in the menu—and cleared his throat for a second time. Clearly, he had not expected that response. Cloth ruffled, and Vincent could hear Godo fidgeting nervously with his napkin.

"I—well, I'm not just at the whim of your—your—"

Vincent lifted an eyebrow over the menu, and Godo began staring intently at the candle in the center of the table. "Just don't expect me to say 'you're welcome.'"

An even thicker silence followed, in which the waiter made his way over to their table to take the orders. The man's tongue had turned into soggy bread when he recognized Godo, but the Wutainese Lord only told him to "Shut up and take the orders to the kitchens."

Though Vincent requested the cheapest full course on the menu, Godo demanded the priciest.

Dishes came out on silver plates that Vincent had reason to suspect—in the form of a small boy in an apron flinging aside the front doors in his haste to slip outside of the acrylic red walls—had only been purchased recently.

The gunman deposited a forkful of fried rice and cabbage into his mouth and chewed it slowly. Godo summarized his thoughts best, having tasted the duck.

"I won't complain on the grounds that it's better than the steamed rice at the pagoda."

He then, of course, proceeded to cringe when Vincent scraped the prongs of his fork against the silver plate.

The flame of the candle flickered low as they ate. Vincent watched the shadows on the wall with muted curiosity. He wondered if he had only forced himself out with Godo Kisaragi to end up alone still—only a sort of very loud alone full of complaints and awkward "Hm"-ing. It served as an ineffectual way of searching for human connection.

But then Godo put some real effort into his last-ditch attempt at sparking conversation. "How is—how is Xie?"

Vincent nearly dropped his fork. "I thought you only wanted good news?"

"I'm allowed to change my mind." Godo sounded affronted. He shoved his plate away from him. His saggy cheeks twitched. "It isn't written anywhere that I'm not."

Vincent eyed the wet shine on Godo Kisaragi's palms while he tried to grasp at the words to best answer the other man's question. "She thinks you have admirable qualities for a goat, and she's upset that President Shinra isn't coming to our wedding."

"Mad as ever then." Godo prodded portions of duck carcass with the fat end of a chopstick.

After the requisite period of silence, Vincent added an afterthought. "She might be, but I can't see how you would know about it."

"You're hypocritical," Godo scoffed. "You carry on about how you have to stay away from Yuffie, and you want to criticize me?" He waved his chopsticks in circles, flinging crumbs onto the tablecloth.

"There's a difference." Vincent flicked aside a stray morsel that had fallen onto his plate. "Yuffie's content in her own head because I've made an effort to understand for too long. She needs to try to work her way out. But Xie's gotten to the point where she doesn't even want to make the effort anymore. No one's following through on the other side. Nobody wants to understand her, so why should she try?"

"Don't talk to me about my family like you know them better than I do," Godo snapped.

"Why not?" Vincent pursed his lips, though he knew Godo could not see it over the frock of his cloak. "I do."

Deflated, Godo's back folded, leaving the old man hunched over himself. At least three fourths of the duck remained untouched, but he ignored it. His eyes followed the wavering of the candlelight. "I'm trying," he told Vincent.

"Excuse me?"

"I'm trying, alright?" Godo's eyes flared like strong wind in heavy snowfall. "It's going to take more than six months for any of us to let go of who we are. And that's what we're doing, by letting go of the bad parts; we're letting go of ourselves. Don't expect me to wake up tomorrow and be okay."

Valentine stared into the eyes that matched the puerile candle and lowered his fork with dedicated slowness. The eyes may have matched the candle, but the words crushed and opened two different things inside of him. "Thank you," he whispered.

"Err—no need to thank me." Godo cleared his throat and shook his head. A smug grin curled onto his face. "Now if we're talking about material, I—"

The PHS in Vincent's breast pocket jerked with a loud vibration, cutting Lord Godo off.

"Thank you," Vincent repeated. His eyes darted down to his unfinished dinner, and he braced his hands on either side of the table to stand. "I'll see you around."

Godo strangled his napkin and watched the red cloak dart from Turtle's Paradise. "You really are going to stiff me with the bill, aren't you?"

He called out, and Vincent heard, but he had already slipped away too far to care.

-

Walking with new speed and not bothering to decipher the direction that the pictures in his head pointed him towards, Vincent snatched the PHS from his pocket and pressed it to his ear. "Yes?"

"Hello Vincent," a nervous yet commanding voice purred. "It's Reeve. I'm calling to talk to you about Yuffie."

"I know," Vincent said, still thinking about Godo's words in the bar.

"Do you mind if I—?"

"Reeve,"—Vincent continued to follow his feet for the second time that night. This time they led him toward the front gate—"we've discussed this. I'm willing to hear any news you're willing to give me. Even if I don't really want to hear it."

"It's about the paintings."

"Hn."

"I trust you received the most recent one."

"I did," Vincent assented, closing his eyes and trying not to guess at directions.

"I was hoping you could tell me what that was about."

"I don't know, Reeve. I'm not exactly around."

"Yes, but I thought you and the green—"

"If you didn't notice with the whole running away thing," Vincent growled, "I have my own problems to contend with, and thinking about Yuffie hasn't gotten me good places." He turned a corner.

"But don't you think that this is a little different? You should be able to put aside your own problems for larger ones."

"And how would you know how big the things that are wrong with me are?"

"What?" The telephone cracked.

"You never bothered to ask," Vincent whispered. "You just assumed it was guilt and darkness—like I did."

"Vincent, what are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about the…" And then Vincent looked. His feet had stopped moving, placing him four feet in front of Yuffie's tiny cat-infested hovel. The mewling echoed through the door. He had not even spared a glance at the musty lot since he returned to Wutai.

"Vincent?"

In five steps Vincent stood directly in front of the entrance. When he pressed his hand to the wood, he thought he could feel it breathing.

"Reeve, are you still there?"

"I think so."

"I need someone to talk to." It felt like something was clawing and writhing inside of his throat, and he had just released it.

A silence on the other end passed when Vincent shoved the door in. "I am talking to Vincent, right?" Reeve's voice quivered. When Vincent did not laugh, much less reply, he added "Wh-what did you need to talk about?"

A kitten wandered to the doorway, hissing and spitting. As Vincent kneeled, it jumped backwards with a yowl, shedding yellow fur on the entryway. Valentine chuckled quietly to himself, gripping the phone so tightly he felt the plastic splinter.

"I'm not so sure." He stood and walked toward the desk, staring intently at the layers of dust caking the letters he recognized so well.

"Helpful."

"I mean to say—I think"—and here Vincent sat down to rub his finger over the bite marks on the last letter—"that I will need someone to talk to, but I'm not ready yet. I won't be, for a while, but I want to be." He sat down in the chair and lowered the collar of his cloak to blow the dust from the desk.

"Oh—umm—yes."

"Reeve, about the green—she was afraid of the green because she got lost in the forest the day she couldn't help Ishwara Florette." His eyes scanned the untidy scrawl without reading it. He recognized pressure exerted by the same orange tabby from his last visit rubbed against his calf.

Vincent heard words in his head, concrete and startling, vivid and real unlike any of his verbal memories, repeating Lord Godo. 'It's going to take more than six months for any of us to let go of who we are.'

"Vincent," Reeve whispered through the smoke of fresh words, swirling with the colors they left behind, "she's getting better."

And because he was too, he let himself believe it.

With a steady hand, Vincent clicked shut the PHS. He pulled a new piece of paper from the side drawer and started to write a letter. This one, he knew, was not for Yuffie. But he also knew that, by the end of the week, another one would be.

Sorry if the ending was weird and longer than I anticipated, but I liked it, so I'm not too apologetic. I will, however and as always, take any constructive criticisms you have on it.

Now please bear with me while I leave the requisite gushing thank you to my readers. I really mean it. To anyone who ever read, reviewed, loved, cried over, clicked on, hated, wondered 'what is up with?', favorited, or alerted this story. I especially want to thank those who started reading this and stuck with it to the end, despite the rough patches. I doubly want to thank anyone who told me that this was shaky or difficult to read. I learned so much from this story. Despite my frustrations, I enjoyed writing it, so I'll probably overhaul it a bit at a time and make it spiffier for new groups of readers some day, so drop me some advice. In the meantime, I hope you all enjoyed it too. I expected that maybe one or two people would read this, and here I stand with nearly 60 reviews. It means so much to me, so if you haven't told me what you think yet, I would love to hear from you. Thanks again, and I hope to see you around.