kh_drabble | IT LIVES!!

been gone way too long oO.
Challenge: Fragile
title: Alabaster
word count:366
notes: um.. started out, basically with the song, and it spiraled out of control.. mrowr.

Yuffie smiled. Yuffie always smiled. And it was not like Aerith's small-mere-turn-of-the-corner-of-the-mouth smile. No, it was not at all like Aerith's tiny smile that showed ever lasting patience and a pain far too deep for any of them to comprehend.
It was bright. It held an impossible innocent light to it that spoke of hard-clung-to-memories of happier times. It was clean and worn to boost the moral of those around her. Yuffie was almost never without that smile.
In fact, she almost made him smile once in a while.
And her eyes. Those round orbs of cobalt blue. They were lit from the center of her soul with an energy and care only she could possess.
If only she would see herself for what she was.
He had caught her, many times, in front of the mirror. She would turn that slender frame of hers this way or that; sucking in her already flat stomach and altering the way she held herself. He had seen her, once or twice, wearing an older dress of Aerith's that she no longer fit in. Yuffie would pose in that dress and she would seem so broken in that instance when assumed no one was around.
Eventually she always sat down in front of the mirror; the borrowed dress pooling around her. Her thin arms would wrap around herself and she would cry.
One day many days after the first time he saw her in that dress and still many days from the locking of Kingdom Hearts, he had comforted Aerith. The woman was distraught and sorely missing her lover who had been rumoured to be at the Olympus Colliseum. She began crying and he felt pity upon this person he had come to think of as family. He hugged her and offered what little solace he could.
And the gasp he heard was so tiny he almost did not believe he heard it. But there was no mistaking that cobalt blue eye peering through the crack in the door. The light that had shown so brightly in that eye before seemed diminished somehow as tears fell, wrought by the breaking of an innocent heart.

self is way out of practice of drabbles *dies*
edit: 4-18-05; ending slightly altered. Dunno if it's any better thou...