she lived like she knew nothing lasts
didn't care to look like anyone else
and she was beautiful
so beautiful
I still hear her laugh
like she's here

(the corrs - angel)

It was dark in the catacombs. He hadn't been down here for the longest time, but he was looking for something and he wasn't leaving again until he found it. He wasn't staying any longer than that, either. He had promised.

She'd told him he would understand when he got here.

Her death had hurt most of all, he thought. Cloud had died, and he was with Aeris, as Vincent wished he could be with Lucrecia and knew he never would be. Tifa had died, and she had followed Cloud. Barret had died, leaving his daughter strong and well provided for. Cid had died, coughing and hacking up blood, and it had been terrible but he hadn't cried and neither had his wife - Shera didn't believe in tears shed for the Captain. Reeve had gone quietly, his kitten - now a scrawny old mog - somehow surviving all the years with him until that moment and they both passed on together.

Red would outlive them all.

Yet Yuffie's death had hurt most of all. It had been at her funeral, surrounded by white, that he had cried to see the ninja's lifeless form. Her face was a little frustrated, mouth tugged into the pout he knew so well - she'd worn it whenever he'd brushed her off, walked away, not replied, as he had done so many times.

So many times, all wasted.

She was the only one who hadn't wasted her life. He understood that, now.

"Will you go back?"

A question she'd asked him so long ago, decades ago. Before she'd returned home, been crowned as ruler of Wutai, been drowned in papers and formalities and blown them all to Hell.

"...I don't know."

He had come back. He had woken for each of their deaths, as though he had known they were coming, as though he lived only to be tormented by them.

And her final question had been just the same.

"Will you go back again?"

A soft kiss, like the touch of the wind on his cheek, and she was gone, the pout firmly in place, a reminder that she would kick him in the afterlife when he let his guard down, and take all his materia and scream as loud as she could in his ear when she caught him by surprise just because she could, and burn his coffin into ashes just as soon as he took the smallest step away from it...

Vincent stopped in front of the coffin, crouched, looking at the base. It was there, in tiny, scratchy letters.

Can the monster-man come out to play?
- Yuffie K.

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