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Squall’s phone buzzes at twelve to one and his mind immediately jumps to worse case scenarios. There’s only three people with his number, one of them is sitting on the couch next to him and the other two are an hour away. He spends the half minute it takes to pull the cellphone from his pocket and click the answer button trying to brace himself for the pronouncement of someone’s death, tries to brace himself and decide before he says hello if it’s Yuffie or Cid he’s lost. It’s neither, although from the exhausted note in Cid’s voice, it sounds like Yuffie is working on ending him.
“Thing is,” Cid pauses and Squall fights the urge to chide about the cigarette he knows the old man is sucking on. “I’m out on a tow, picking up a truck from an interstate accident, fuckers these days think they’re invincible. Got here before the asshole cops though, you know what that means. Need you to swing by the school if you can, sit with her ‘til I get back. Last thing we need is for her to turn runner on us.”
Both of them hear the understood again.
There’s no question about it, Squall’s already half-way through getting his shoes on by the time Cid finishes. He assures him that he’ll be there as soon as possible and that they’ll see Cid when he gets home tonight.
He has to ask his roommate, Zack, for a ride. It’s a little embarrassing, but the beat up old car Squall claims as transportation is a little more beat up than car at the moment. Zack doesn’t mind though, he never minds, he’s annoyingly good at rolling with the punches. On the road Zack goes on about how long it’s been since he’s seen little Yuffie (to which Squall snorts, anyone who refers to Yuffie with that level of affection has never realized she’s filched something from them). “Hey, since we’ll be back home, how about a stop by Seventh Heaven? I haven’t had one of Tifa’s homemade pies in way, way too long.” And really, Squall isn’t one to ever say no to any of Tifa’s cooking.
The main office of the high school hasn’t changed that much since Squall left. There are new chairs, and that peculiar smell that comes with new carpet, and an unfamiliar secretary behind the desk. He feels nervous all of a sudden, has to remind himself that he’s beyond the reach of this office now. He gives his name to the unhappy woman at the computer, tells her he’s here to pick up Yuffie. The woman purses her lips and gives him the once over. “We’re only supposed to release students to family members.” And the look in her eyes says you two are clearly not related.
Squall is still trying to decide how much of it he’ll have to explain it’s complicated won’t suffice I’m sort of her family would probably raise more questions, when he’s saved by the principal. “It’s alright, I’ll vouch for him. Call the nurse’s station please, and have them send Yuffie when they’re done.” Cid Kramer holds the door to his office open and gestures Squall inside with a smile.
Squall takes a seat in an uncomfortable chair that squeaked as his weight settled. There is a glass bowl full of individually wrapped hard candies in a myriad of colors on the edge of the desk. Principal Kramer (and suddenly Squall remembers his freshman year assembly “Remember kids, it’s principal with a P-A-L, because we should be friends”) assumes his position on the other side. Squall does his best to relax, to un-tense his muscles and remind himself that he’s not in trouble, stop looking like you have something to apologize for (then again it never hurts to apologize for Yuffie in general.)
“How’s university?”
“Fine.” Squall reminded himself not to be so terse, he’s always too abrupt, and so hastily adds “sir” with an awkward smile.
Principal Kramer nods and continues his small talk, making general inquiries about what Squall had been up to since graduation (school mostly), what he’s majoring in (criminal justice), how is old Cid (to which the reply was good with an understated question mark at the end, Squall is beginning to suspect a trap of some sort.) Principal Kramer nods along, not really paying attention to any answer given and Squall realizes this was all a sort of recital for him, working up to explain what had happened today that has ended with Squall sitting in this office again.
“Cid is a good man,” begins Principal Kramer. “He tries to do his best by you kids and I think, for the most part, quite a bit of good has been done. Normally, in situations like this, we require a conference with the guardian of the student. But I know Cid is busy, and I know all we’d really accomplish is doing more harm by calling him off work to tend to things I can just as easily say to you, comfortable in the knowledge that you’ll deliver the message.”
The words don’t quite absorb after that. Principal Kramer tries to deliver the news as gently as possible, but there seems to be a lot of grey area. A bathroom brawl with an older student, Leblanc, neither party will fess up to what happened. All they can deduce is that Yuffie swung first, Leblanc has been an inconsolable mess since the teacher intervened, and all Yuffie will say is “I don’t like her stupid face.” Both parties have been suspended, a solid five school days with no chance of making up the work.
There is a knock at the door and Principal Kramer stands, raising his voice in a familiar no-arguments-from-this-point-on way. “Well then, Squall, it was good to see you. I am sorry about the circumstance.” He walks Squall to his office door, shakes his hand firmly. “You tell Highwind if he needs anything, my door is always open to an old friend.”
Squall nods his thanks, words still abandoned somewhere in the backseat of Zack’s truck, and steps through the door.
Yuffie is sitting in one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs situated directly beneath the window. She looks up and Squall winces on her behalf. She has the telltall beginnings of what will soon blossom into a spectacular black eye, a long cut across one cheek, and a sloshy ziplock bag with the remains of ice pressed to her mouth. She lowers the ice for a moment, revealing a split lip that’ll leave her talking funny for a few days at least.
“Let’s go,” Squall says.
Yuffie slinks all the way out to Zack’s truck, curls into the seat brimming with the kind of dejection that is unique to young teens. The ride home, no, the ride to Cid’s is full of uncomfortable silence. Zack tries to stay cheery and upbeat, singing along with the radio and remarking on the little changes to this side of town since he was last here; but beneath the murderous aura of Squall and the ball of general pissed off teenage angst in the backseat, even he finds his optimism flailing.
When they arrive at Cid’s, Yuffie jumps out before Squall has even finished undoing his seat belt. “Hey kid,” shouts Zack out the open window, “you look so much prettier when you smile.” And as if he feels the need to show her how one looks, he flashes one at her. Yuffie blinks twice, drops her hand from her mouth and peels her lips back in a grimace. Her teeth are stained pink and the places where her gums have been cracked shine back a sticky red.
Without missing a beat or even flinching, and really this is why everyone loves Zack whether they want to or not, he says, “See, beautiful.”
They watch her down the driveway, quietly in awe of that peculiar way she manages to kind of shuffle and stomp at the same time. Teenagers: a study in contradictions. Squall runs a hand through his hair, tells Zack not to wait for him, that it looks like this is going to require more than just babysitting until Cid gets home- that quite possibly this is going to require a family meeting and he spits that last bit out, clearing the venom from his heart momentarily.
Zack shrugs it off with that easy amicableness that is annoyingly trademark Zack. “I’ll be at Teef’s for a while, just lemme know if you change your mind.” He hits the horn twice and is gone.
Squall is actually surprised to find Yuffie hadn’t locked him out. He follows the trail of discarded things up the stairs, backpack then shoes then socks and jeans. Here he pauses, shouts down the hall that he’s coming around the corner in case she’s standing there naked for some reason but no, she’s locked herself in the bathroom. He can hear the water hissing and already steam is curling from under the door. Squall crosses his arms and leans against the wall, settling in to play sentry. He’ll wait her out, they’re on the second floor, it’s not like she has anywhere to go.
Forty minutes later when Squall is starting to entertain the idea that she actually drowned herself in the shower spray, the water finally squeaks off. There’s the sound of someone shuffling about, a sharp bang that could only be a shin meeting the toilet bowl, gritted swears squeaking out, another strange shuffle noise, and then nothing. Squall waited to the count of ten, then twenty, still nothing. He knocks twice, reminding himself to stay calm, to remember Yuffie is like a cat. If he didn’t handle her with kid gloves she’d get offended and wander off (again) and it might be weeks until she came back and that would break Cid and Squall was not going to let that be his fault (again).
“Yuffie?” No response. He tries again. “Yuffie, you can’t stay in there forever.” Silent still, Squall sighs, she’s going to make him get verbally involved and he hated that. “It’s not all that bad,” he grumbles to the door knob. “Cid’ll be kind of pissed at you, but you know he won’t kick you out or anything dumb like that, don’t you?”
“Of course I do,” says Yuffie from behind him. Squall cast one glance from her to the bathroom door and back, refusing to ask her how she managed that. Yuffie loved playing Houdini, and asking her about her amazing disappearances only encouraged her.
“Then why won’t you say what this was about?” He watches as her expression shutters closed. Yuffie slides down the wall, fingers already worrying the hem of the night shirt. Squall recognizes it as one of the freebies given out when he was doing college tours. He thought it had gotten thrown away or involuntarily turned into one of Cid’s workshop rags.
In the distance a clock ticks away the minutes. Squall’s anger has cooled to an achy weariness in his chest. It’s always like this; he doesn’t know why it still gets to him. Dealing with Yuffie is like trying to pull your own teeth with a crowbar, that’s never going to change. It’s just…he hates seeing her like this, small and still and quiet. Those are words that should never apply to Yuffie.
She mumbles something into her knees, too quiet (and man, did he never think he’d be saying THAT) to hear. Squall flops next to her, nudging her in the side try again.
Yuffie fidgets, squirming away from his elbow. “It doesn’t matter, I just lost my temper.”
“You don’t really expect me to buy that.”
“It’s not a big deal.”
“You’re suspended.”
“It was just a stupid remark; I shouldn’t have let it get to me.”
“Five days, Yuffie.”
“I mean, I don’t regret it, but I should have taken the high road or something.”
“No making up work. You’re going to have to pull straight A’s for the rest of the year.”
“Or antagonized her back until she hit me, god it’s so hard to think in the heat of the moment.”
“Cid’s going to be disappointed in you.”
“I know that!” she snaps, bouncing to her feet. “Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think that’s exactly why I can’t tell him what happened?” Yuffie paces the hall, twisting the hem of the shirt in her hands. “If I tell him, he’s going to make that face, that stupid, stupid how could you face and then he’ll start wondering if it’s his fault, if he should have tried to find a different home, a better home for me. I don’t want that, Squall. I don’t want him to feel bad about taking me in.”
“Tell me then, and when Cid gets here I’ll try to smooth things over.”
Yuffie deflates, her burst of energy spent already, slumping back against the wall. “I just…. I came out of the stall and she was there, washing her hands or fixing her hair or whatever, and she just started. Asked if I had been sleeping well, which is weird because, I mean, Leblanc and I aren’t even near friendly territory. Then she kept going ‘must be hard,’ she said, ‘Squall off to college and everything, the old man must be working you double time. You must be so sore, how are you even able to sit down.’
“And I mean, if that was all I probably could have walked away, don’t laugh, I could have! God, it’s not like this is new, I’ve been dealing with this crap for years, people always asking if Cid has threesomes with us, what’s it like to live with you because clearly Cid only took me in because you two have such raging boners you couldn’t satisfy each other. But she kept friggen pushing it, asking me if Cid made me dress up like a little kid, if he made me call him daddy while he fucked me and-“
Yuffie hiccups, sliding down the wall until she was seated again, knees drawn tight against her chest, her fingers going white at the edges, where she dug them into her legs. “I’m just so tired of all those stupid kids, they can talk about you all they want, you can handle yourself, but it would crush Cid.”
Squall stares at the space between them, less than a hands breadth and it may as well have been continents. He listens in silence to the quiet sounds of her grief and does nothing. Comforting wasn’t his forte, in fact nobody in that house was particularly good at it. His mind spins with her story, trying desperately to digest it.
It had never been this bad for him though, not really. But Squall had been a loner and people thought he was mysterious and deep, so even if there nasty things had been said, they were probably said outside his range-except his senior year, when Reno made a nasty comment about how Yuffie had started to fill out a little, but that had only required a slammed cafeteria tray from Zack to shut him up.
Yuffie, meanwhile, was loud and vibrant and caustic and prickly and friendly all at once. She was fiercely protective over those she claimed as hers, always had been, that’s what got her caught on the streets to begin with.
Squall sits, making note of her thin shaking shoulders, of the tightness of her knuckles, the way she is pulled as close to herself as she can be. He listens to her quiet anguish, and he says nothing until they hear the truck door slam shut in the driveway. “Stay here,” he squeezes her knee once in what he hoped was a reassuring manner and went down to meet Cid.
From the couch Yuffie can just make out the shape of Squall’s left shoulder and nothing else. There is the familiar low rumble of his voice, followed by the considerably less low key scream of “SHE DID WHAT?!” and on and on. She pretends not to watch the slant and rise of that shoulder through the blinds, pretends to be captivated by the dust motes caught in sunlight. There’s nobody in the house to give her a knowing look, but she’ll know if she lets herself watch, so she does her best to look bored and disinterested and look everywhere except out the window.
Really, she’s just tired. Emotionally drained after today’s escapades and physically sore from the beat down. She would give Leblanc this much: the hag gave as good as she got.
Cid comes through the door like a storm, doing that thing where he’s angry and knows he’s angry so he’s trying to pretend he’s not angry and stepping too lightly, overcompensating times a thousand and he plonks down in a chair across from Yuffie and just stares, taking long and slow breaths through his nose.
She tries, and fails, to gauge the atmosphere. Should she look sorry? Scared? Play up her injuries? Yuffie allows her gaze to flick over to Squall, seeking assistance but of course he’s too busy leaning against walls and staring moodily at the floor, no help. Cid leans forward and panic ceases her heart. Don’t ask me to promise not to do it again, don’t ask me that.
“Next time,” he growls, “next time, not at school, and don’t get caught.” His eyes flittering over her injuries – and really they look so much better than they did before the shower, all clean now and no dried blood anywhere- and she sees the compulsive tick in his knuckles, he wants to get up, smooth her brow and break out the antiseptic, but he’s never sure where the lines are and he’s scared to push her away and she’s scared she’s pushing him away, so she smiles tightly, enjoys the way it breaks the skin on her lip open again, and nods.
Cid pats her knee awkwardly, the great sum of all their familial interactions, and stands with a pop of his back. “Guess I better get dinner started,” he announces to no one in particular. He’s barely made it to the kitchen though, when the front door creaks open. It was a confident creak, the kind that comes from a person very familiar with a premises opening the door.
“Hello,” Zack sings out. “I brought a peace offering.” He rounded the corner, holding a stack of to-go boxes in front of him like a shield, the soothing scent of Tifa’s cooking filling the room. “and if that doesn’t work, I also brought Aerith, and who can hurt her sweet face?”
Aerith swats at his shoulder affectionately- really they’re so disgusting that if Yuffie didn’t love them both so much she’d be tempted to retch right now- and steps past him gracefully to come sit beside Yuffie. Aerith smells of lavender and juniper and mint and other things that Yuffie could never name if she were given a thousand years to try, and she wants nothing more than to lay her head in Aerith’s lap and let the other girl ground her, sooth the invisible hurts thrumming through Yuffie’s heart.
So she does, flops unceremoniously over and buries her face in the grass stains on Aerith’s knees. Aerith laughs like a bell, pulling Yuffie farther away from the unpleasantness of the day and into her own sweet bubble where she can pretend her family is normal and sane and whole and not patched together of different materials. Aerith cards a hand through Yuffie’s hair gently. “Had a long day?” Yuffie murmurs an affirmative into the grass stains and Aerith drops it, just like that, just goes on playing with her hair while the boys break out the plates and sets the table and Cid calls from the kitchen “Ya’ll staying for dinner.” No question, because of course it’s not a question, Highwind’s door is always open to his ragamuffin group, even the ones who weren’t necessarily raised under his roof- even the ones like Zack who had an actual family to go to that didn’t consider Dysfunctional to be their guiding principle.
Aerith shakes Yuffie’s shoulder gently. “C’mon sleeping beauty, let’s go eat. Tifa packed something special just for you.” Yuffie growls and snuggles in deeper, the worldest most awkward house cat. “If you don’t get up, Squall’s going to eat it.”
That…that gave her pause. “Fine,” she grumped, “but after dinner I demand we resume snuggles.”
Aerith laughed again, brightening the room with the sound of it. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
They sauntered into the tiny dining room together, everyone is pressed into the table, elbows knocking and knees rubbing and Yuffie may have “accidentally” kicked Squall when he grumbled about how long it had taken the girls to get moving. Cid takes a moment with his fork poised over a bite of something meaty and gravy-ful to say, “Make sure to tell Tifa thanks.” Which was the closest this group would get to giving grace, and they all dig in, conversation lapsing into small talk for the duration of the meal.
Yuffie does get her Aerith cuddles after dinner, not nearly for long enough though before Zack declares it time to leave. There is a not so casual reminder that Zack will be heading back for campus tonight, if Squall wanted to hitch a ride. Squall exchanges Looks with Cid, mostly, and then passes a brief once over of Yuffie, which make her stomach flip and she bites her lip, using the pain to keep her hormones in check, before he finally consents with a “Yeah, sure.”
Everyone herds towards the door, exchanging hugs where it was appropriate- mainly to Aerith and Zack and then Aerith again. Except for Cid who even gave one to Squall, but it’s been a weird day and nobody mentions the out of character affection. Yuffie waits til Cid has shuffled back inside and it’s just her and Squall on the door stoop. She scratches at a mosquito bite with her foot and stares studiously at the begonias lining the house. “What did you tell him?”
Squall shrugs. “A bit of the truth, a little too much lying, he won’t ask you about it, I may have heavily implied it’s a sensitive subject that may send you running.” She winces, and groans when the pain shoots through her body. Squall lying to Cid because of her? It truly is the end of days.
“Thanks again, for today.” She mumbles to Squall’s naval, trying to swallow her awkwardness. Gratitude is hard. “I guess we should hug it out or something, that’s what siblings do right?” and she opens her arms, takes a step forward, and is promptly stopped by a hand to her forehead.
“You’re welcome; just don’t make me do it again.” He pauses, frowning. “If you have problems you know you can call me.” Squall slides his hand across the top of her hair in a not quite ruffle. “And we’re not siblings.”
With those enigmatic and frustrating parting words he jogs off to the truck before Zack can start honking. Yuffie stands outside long enough to watch the taillights disappear into the flow of traffic, becoming nothing more than another set of angry red in the concrete sea. She stands out there, watching the last place the dirty old truck was, scratching at that mosquito bite on her ankle, chewing on her lip and thinking.
“Hey girlie, yer letting bugs in!”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m coming.” Closes and latches the door and turn the lights off on her way through the house as everything settles down for normality.