Archive of Our Own

The Shinra mansion perched above Nibelheim wasn’t exactly the ideal place to spend the night, but Cloud and Tifa had been, totally understandably, distressed by the idea of staying in the creepily rebuilt inn. The storm had whipped up over the mountains faster than Barret thought clouds could move, but Tifa had assured them this was pretty normal weather for the area.

They couldn’t exactly start a fire and send up some smoke signals in the hope that Cid would see them and come pick them up with it raining cats and dogs out there. He was grounded the same as them, and probably just as irritated.

So the mansion was their only choice, and they’d picked upstairs rooms to fortify — that is, barricade the rooms with furniture against any of the fucked up monsters that might wander up out of the lab. That fucking vampire looking motherfucker included, of course. Barret and Cloud had one of the musty and hopefully not too vermin infested bed, and Nanaki was sprawled out on a moldering sofa a few feet away. 

At least Nanaki and Cloud had fallen asleep, and Barret lay awake restlessly and listened to their even breaths in the dark room lit occasionally by distant lightning. At least the thunder wasn’t booming and making everyone twitch awake. He wondered if the girls were sleeping any better than he was, in the room across the hall, and he kind of envied Cait that he could just shut himself off for a bit whenever he needed to.

The last few days… alright, days, weeks, months, years, had been one crisis after another it seemed, and Barret always found himself counting them off like fuck-off miserable sheep whenever he couldn’t sleep.

He had a long list of worst days of his life. He could make a tier list of shitty things he’d been through, and as he lay awake a long time in the musty cobwebbed bed, he tried to figure out where that day fit in.

S-tier was reserved for losing Myrna, Dyne, and Eleanor. 

Losing his arm was up there, and he didn’t really know where to put the ruination of his entire reputation alongside of that. It was his fault so it was probably further down the list, he figured.

He had to add the plate falling. Losing Jessie, Biggs, and Wedge. 

Then there was the horrific bit of time he’d thought Marlene was dead and buried under all that rubble.

Probably had to add finding out Dyne had survived and had gone a lot further off the deep end than Barret had, which he admitted was maybe saying something.

He’d loved Dyne, about as much as he’d loved Myrna, and Eleanor too. It hadn’t been a regular sort of partnership, and they’d got their fair share of sideways looks and backhanded comments, but so long as they’d had each other it didn’t really matter to Barret.

The reactor though, and Shinra, had led to some tiptoeing around one another there towards the end, even though it had seemed like all of Shinra’s promises were coming true… but like everything of Shinra’s, it had turned to shit.

Alright so, all of that, save the reputation thing, was S-tier. He hadn’t had a whole lot of good things in his life since Corel had burned and took almost everyone he loved along with it in the flames. 

He still had Marlene, he still had his little girl that they’d all promised to raise as their own small village when they’d found out Myrna couldn’t have kids of her own. Eleanor had even said she wanted more, a big family, with as many kids as they could all love. Her and Myrna had joked that, with Dyne and Barret’s big strong arms, they'd have the best huggers on the Planet to rock them all to sleep at night.

One day, one day he’d get back to Midgar and run into Aerith’s mom’s place to find his baby. Would Marlene be taller by then? She was already shooting up like a little flower. He was glad she had some of those to take care of, too. She’d promised Aerith she’d water ‘em every day. He wondered if her hair would be longer, or if she’d have lost another baby tooth while he was gone…

Either way, he spent most of his sleepless nights comforting himself with one day seeing her happy smile again, to hear her yell out ‘daddy!’ and fling herself into his arms and tell him everything that had happened while he’d been away.

He had to hope that was true, anyway, what with all the bullshit they’d been hearing on the radio here and there about ‘Wutai’ and ‘Avalanche’ bombing this or that upper plate target. At this point, with everything he knew, he wouldn’t be surprised if both sides were just more Shinra troops dressed up in costumes firing blanks at each other and setting off explosions that were doing real damage that Shinra would paper over and pretend it was fixed the same as in the slums.

Along with all the nightmares though, there were other people he cared about now, people he was coming to love. Sometimes — alright, a lot of the time, he was loving them against his better judgment and maybe even against his will. 

The thought of losing them too… it was keeping him up some nights, he wasn’t gonna lie. 

This was just the worst one in awhile.

Cloud had grumbled like a disgruntled kitten when Barret had dragged him away from where he’d been nervously sharpening his big-ass sword by the window and dragged him into bed. They were being careful enough, with Cloud’s sword propped right where he could grab it and Barret’s gun disengaged but down at the bottom of the bed where he could jump up and pop it on it within a minute.They'd practiced that, in fact, and they’d even needed to do it a couple times. Why then was Barret feeling like he needed to put his gun back on and make sure Cloud had his hand on the sword in his damned sleep?

He squeezed his eyes shut, wrapping his arm around Cloud, hand pressed against his chest to feel his heart beating. He’d done the same thing with Marlene his last night in Midgar, crammed into the tiny guest bed in Aerith’s house.

Hell, he’d spent a lot of nights unable to sleep, holding his baby girl and feeling her heart beat and listening to her breathing. Even after they’d found a home and she’d had her own little bed, he’d wake up in a panic that she was gone, that she was burned up in a fire, that she was shot by Scarlet in her cradle, that she’d been snatched away from him by some stranger.

Half the time after that he’d spent the rest of the nights checking and cleaning his gun and staring out the window at the equally sleepless slum of Sector Seven.

He understood why Cloud wanted to sit by the window and look over his weapon, but after the day he’d had, Barret couldn’t stand the thought of going to sleep, not sure if he’d wake up to find Cloud gone too.

The image of that SOLDIER, haggard and stumbling after his frantic, obsessive battle with Cloud kept playing out in his mind as he tried to, so it was no wonder that the moment he finally drifted off he’d start fucking dreaming about it too.

It had already been tragic and enraging how many times he’d tried to protect or save the poor bastards in the black robes. On his watch they’d been shot by Turks, fallen down mine shafts,been drowned, eaten by monsters, who knew how many bodies they’d come across along the way. He’d stopped counting… 

No, it wasn’t that he’d stopped, it was that he just plain couldn’t keep up. 

The worst thing was the times the guys had got grabbed up by Hojo’s experiments. They’d attacked Barret and his friends, and he hadn’t had a choice but to kill them. 

He’d had bad dreams about them too. 

Who had they been, before? 

Were they all like that SOLDIER boy, Barret didn’t think he’d ever even learned his name. It definitely had to do with Shinra, which wasn’t a surprise… finding poor Broden on the road up to Nibelheim had made him feel sick and that was before he’d begun putting the pieces together.

Watching that crazy SOLDIER degrade before their eyes, collapsing in a ring of black robes and stumbling to his feet to become one of them? That… 

Could that happen to…

All those shitty dreams melted together, and now it wasn’t some gaunt unidentifiable face under that tattered black hood.

Now

Now it was Cloud.

Barret’s nightmares were nothing if not thorough and creative when his mind wanted to torture him.

Cloud getting grabbed up by one of Hojo’s gross experiments, the monster’s tentacles getting in him and shaping him into an abomination that turned his pained and terrified face down at Barret before the thing he’d become went for one of the girls and Barret had to shoot him.

That big-ass condor snatching Cloud up like it had one of those poor motherfuckers, carried off never to be seen again.

You’d think there’d be some logic about that one, since Cloud had that gianormous sword, but that was nightmares for you.

He could see Cloud falling into the busted Corel reactor before Barret could catch him, bobbing to the surface and dressed in black with his pale face to the sky before slowly sinking.

He wasn’t sure what had happened to Cloud in Gongaga, but he hoped when he woke up he reminded himself to remind himself to keep Cloud as far away from reactors as possible. They were obviously bad for him. More than once lately he’d felt bad for how he’d treated the kid in the beginning — well, not a kid he reminded himself. Cloud was just scrawny under his wiry muscle and so much shorter than Barret that he seemed a lot younger than he was.

He’d looked back in his memory of the reactors and remembered the headaches Cloud had had, clutching his head when they got closest to the pools of Mako that were the prime locations to set explosives. Yeah, Mako wasn’t exactly healthy to be around for everyone, but especially Cloud needed to keep his scrawny butt away from it.

More horrors paraded across Barret’s dreamscape, of Cloud being the one to fall into mine shafts and wander into the woods to get eaten. A bit hysterically, he thought it might be a good idea to invest in some kind of… leash, like he’d had on Marlene when she’d been a bit younger.

The image of Cloud getting swarmed under by hundreds of men in ragged black, only to stand up and walk away from Barret without ever hearing him shout his damned name or remember who they were when they grabbed him was somehow what made Barret jerk awake. His hand clenched into a fist where it had been wrapped around Cloud and he rolled to his feet and had his gun on just like he’d practiced because Cloud was gone.

There was sweat pouring down Barret’s neck and rolling down his sides about as thick as the rain slicking down the cracked window as he glanced around quickly, eyes falling on the spot where Cloud’s sword had been and wondering if it was a good thing it was gone. That meant Cloud had it, and if he had it he could protect himself.

 “Barret?” Nanaki lifted his head, jaws spreading wide in a toothy yawn, “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, s’fine, probably.” Barret adjusted his weapon, telling the lie with the movement.

“You want me to come along?” the Firemane asked, tilting his head to the side, “Where’s Cloud?”

“Dunno,” Barret admitted, “gonna go look. He’s been having nightmares and probably just went to stretch his legs...”

“And we both know,” Nanaki finished, “that when Cloud ‘stretches his legs’ he tends to go out monster hunting.”

“Yep.” Barret shoved his feet into his shoes. “Not much around here that’ll need a whole party, get some more sleep.”

Nanaki lowered his head onto his paws and was out almost before Barret had finished talking. If he was having nightmares, he never seemed to show it… but Barret bet he’d had ‘em all the same. 

Weren’t nobody in this motley crew who didn’t have their fair share, and everyone dealt with them differently.

Cloud went out and hunted around the camp, usually never going far enough to get in trouble but just far enough to not wake anyone else. Barret took his weapons apart and put them back together. Tifa got up and checked all of their supplies and made lists of things they’d need to do or what they should pick up at their next stop. 

Aerith… Aerith was probably the most normal one of all of them. Aerith just cried, but it was an eerie sort of grief where she’d stare right up at the ceiling and not move or make a single sound.

He had a feeling that her and Red had the same kind of nightmares, of the same place, and the same person’s hands filled with needles and scalpels. Fuck Hojo, everything was coming back to him, and after what they’d seen in the basement, it looked like everything that had gone wrong in Nibelheim and afterward was his fault. 

Barret wished he’d taken the shot on the beach, no matter what Aerith had said.

He bent down to grab his boots, and a cold creepy feeling rose in his gut as he saw Cloud’s still sitting beside his, still caked in mud from the day before. He hesitated, looking back at Red, wondering if he should ask for backup after all.

Cloud… Cloud was probably just downstairs then, right? He’d just grabbed his sword outta habit… 

But that creepy feeling was quickly turning to ice in his stomach as he opened the door and, as quietly as a man his size was able, tip-toed down the hall to peek into the girl’s room, hoping he’d find the three of them talking or something. 

No dice. Both girls were fast asleep, cuddled up just like him and Cloud had been. Cait Sith was flopped down at the end of the bed, looking like nothing more than an actual plushie for once. He closed the door, twisting the handle so it didn’t click, and turned to go down the stairs. 

Cloud and Tifa had mentioned that the place had always been a little weird, almost no one from Shinra ever coming to use the big old house, and everyone had agreed it was haunted. Cloud had insisted one of the boys a bit older than him had gone inside and never come out again, but Tifa had just rolled her eyes and said that was just a rumor… 

He had a feeling Tifa agreed with him now that she’d seen what it was really like.

Cold, wet air slapped Barret in the face as soon as he got down the stairs, and he was bolting out the open door and into the rain without a second thought. He glanced around, heart pounding and cursing the storm that left the ground soggy and sucking at his shoes as he first circled the house, and then jogged up to the gate.

Footprints, well, those were for sure not going to be a viable way to track anyone, boots or no boots, what with the rain and mud filling everything in, not to mention the darkness. 

Barret smacked the clip light on his jacket to turn it on, twisting it so it was the brightest it could get and looked around anyway…

There.

He crouched down, brows pinching together as he saw a long, thick line of dug up mud that was quickly filling in with water. It led from the front door, and he slipped back inside to have a look at the floor there, and at the stairs, not wanting to believe what it must be.

But, no, there it was, a scrap all along the carpet leading to the door and down the stairs too, where Cloud’s sword had dragged across and split the material in a thin line. The only way it could have not woke them all up, was just because the storm had been so loud. 

“Fuck, fuck.” Barret ran his hand over his head, torn between running up and getting help, versus the worry it would take too long and he’d not… not get there in time.

“Fuck, goddamn, motherfucking.” He was back out into the rain as quick as thinking about it. He didn’t like the odds of the storm getting stronger and making it impossible to find that tell-tale drag mark. 

His boots pounded loudly over a short wooden bridge, searching for the gouge in the path on the other side and following it. He curled his hand into a fist and muttered, “You had better just be sleepwalking.”

Cloud’s feet hurt, but it was a distant thing that didn’t really matter when everything else hurt a lot more. His heart hurt the most, hard and cold in his chest, broken and bleeding out, but he had to just keep putting one foot in front of the other. He had to get to the reactor, he reminded himself, stumbling over a pile of rocks and heaving Zack’s

[Pain bit at his head and he wound his fingers into his hair, banging his forehead with his wristlet and not even registering that minor pain when it hurt to remember]

he heaved his sword over them, wishing he had one of those harnesses like a real SOLDIER, He couldn’t remember why Zack he had left it behind… had he left it, or had he run up the mountain after it with everything burning behind him and cinders speckling his uniform and he thought part of his helmet was melted but he had to keep going. 

He had to get to the reactor.

He had to get to the reactor.

He had to get to the reactor.

He had to find Zack 

“Hmn.” 

He fought back a suffocating feeling, smoke and blood in his lungs and 

Cloud was the only one left.

Cloud was the only one left who could stop Sephiroth…

Rain pelted his face, running down his cold skin and dripping off the tip of his nose to seep between his bitten lips. Icy drops pinged off of his pauldron… pauldrons? His head swam as two different images appeared in his mind's eye, skewed and dizzying as though he saw one figure in each of his eyes — a faceless man wearing a SOLDIER First uniform seemed burned onto his left iris, and an equally blank Shinra Trooper on the other. The helmet looked empty, save for two searingly bright blue eyes hovering in nothingness. 

It reminded him of one of those magic eye pictures he’d seen in a magazine as a kid. He tried relaxing his vision to see what would happen, the images shifting and melding together like two photo negatives pasted one atop the other, blurry and indistinguishable as a person at all, just a mish-mash of blue and black wavering back and forth before Cloud blinked and they were gone. 

His heart hurt, and he could feel it pounding in his chest in an unfamiliar way — it shouldn’t beat at all, he thought, he wasn’t supposed to have survived. 

People like worthless Cloud Strife didn’t survive things like this.

It felt like he was pushing through shadows, penned in on all sides by a thick and clinging darkness. Maybe that’s just what grief felt like, what it was to lose one of the only people he’d ever loved. He wondered if he would mourn the destruction of everything he’d hated too, without that distant and childish hope that one day, one day he’d come back to Nibelheim in his SOLDIER First uniform and he wouldn’t have to hide anymore. He’d dreamed about it, and written down silly journal entries about what he’d say — how he’d brush off their praise as though he’d always deserved it, instead of being the village’s scapegrace son that no one wanted and none had missed.

Cloud shook that off, he wasn’t worthless, he wasn’t pathetic. He was a SOLDIER, a First Class, and everyone had been happy to see him, to tell him how good he looked, and admired how well he’d done for himself… as… as they’d always said he would, always said he’d be nothing a hero, one day.

One day

Not today, no not…

Cloud had to get to the reactor, even if it killed him. 

Like it had the last time.

Barret felt like his chest had cracked open wide enough for his heart to drop down into his guts when he saw the rain soaked figure in black just ahead of him. The mud sucked at his boots, sticking him in place for a moment before he wrenched free of it and rushed forward. He grabbed the man by the shoulder and turned him around, reaching up to jerk back the hood to look into the same face he’d been staring at, waking and sleeping, for weeks now. The man didn’t really look at Barret, they never seemed to see anything in front of them unless it was an obstacle they’d have to stumble around to find a new way to go wherever the hell they were getting to. 

He searched the vacant face for a moment, gently taking his arm and pulling the sleeve up to check his bicep where a number was tattooed. 

Cloud didn’t have a number on him. 

A sick feeling filled his stomach when the painful thought struck Barret’s brain that he kind of wished he had one, so he’d know which one was Cloud, should push come to —

It wasn’t going to happen, it wasn’t, but as Barret turned the poor bastard around and nudged him back towards the safety of the village he got a better idea. He reached up and touched the metal tags hanging around his neck on their beaded chain that he’d never taken off since he’d got them. He only ever noticed them when he was getting dressed or if they got twisted around while he was sleeping. 

A long time ago, what felt like a lifetime, there had been a cave-in down in one of the mine shafts that weren’t as safe as the others. The foremen had even told the guys who went down there that it was a bad idea, that they had stuff coming from Rocket Town to shore up the walls and make them safe to go back down in. There was a reason people in Corel joked that the miners’ heads were full of rocks and dirt and not much else, because the idiots thought they knew better and took a shitty risk they hadn’t even needed to. There were other shafts, not quite as rich as the one Barret had been working through at the time but he’d known it wasn’t worth it. 

He wasn’t stupid, even though he didn’t know when to stop running his damn mouth and tended to shoot first and ask questions later when it came to Shinra troops.

Digging out the bodies had been a living nightmare, and there was no one else but Dyne willing to help him do it. They’d wanted to bring in some kind of excavator robot, rented from Shinra for an insane price, but there had almost been a riot amongst the survivors. A robot wouldn’t know the difference between dirt and bodies, and the thought of their friends (and brothers, and uncles, and fathers) getting cut up by what amounted to a fancy mechanical shovel made them all furious.

So…

It had been Barret and Dyne volunteering to do it themselves. It took nearly four weeks, shoring up the walls they dug out so they wouldn’t join the bodies of their friends that they’d started being able to smell after the first week. It had been August, in the desert, and the smell of rot had burned itself into his nostrils for months after it was all over. 

The bodies had been, well… they’d had to bury them in one grave, with one marker, because with all of them wearing overalls and filthy and bloated with decomposition it had been impossible to tell any of them apart. 

After that, Dyne and him had gotten tags stamped with their names and information about their next of kin — listing their wives and each other on one of them, and an apology on the other that they’d left so suddenly, just in case. 

Dyne had written them both, all poetic and shit, ‘cause he’d been smarter than Barret by a long-shot. He’d always read books from the tiny library in town that was really just someone’s converted garage where they stored their own books and people left the ones they’d bought so anyone else could read them too. No one really complained when they were brought back with coal smeared fingerprints when most of them were already like that anyway. 

His boyfriend, and wasn’t that word dumb as shit but Barret thought ‘lover’ was… What was the word? Right… pretentious as hell; but Dyne had talked him into trying to read ‘Loveless’ once. He hadn’t really got it, but maybe that was why so many people spent so much time making shit up about what they thought it meant. 

Barret didn’t think it was that good, but what did he know? Maybe he was stupid after all.

Every time he saw one of the robed men trudging slowly ahead of him he had to stop and check them over, then frantically look at the ground to see if the marks of Cloud’s sword grinding through the mud continued on. 

“Screw the dog tags,” he muttered, “I’m gonna put a fuckin’ bell on him!”

Barret really did not fucking like the fact that, as he rushed up the swiftly increasing incline, he saw more and more of the robed guys the further he went. He didn’t remember whether Cloud or Yuffie or Tifa had mentioned seeing them there — mostly they seemed content to stay in the village or down in the foothills.

He also fucking hated that the robed guys almost never screamed, because it meant he lumbered around one of those huge rocks that were as spiky as Cloud’s hair to find one of them gasping on the ground as monsters mauled him. 

One of them turned towards Barret and lunged at him, a hulking wolf with eyes that reflected green-gold in the beam of Barret’s clip light. It kept coming after getting hit with the first hail of bullets, red blood tinged a glowing green that was sloughed off into the mud in the rain. Mako crazed, it seemed to not feel any pain as it shook itself off. Its paws skidded in the mud, giving Barret enough time to finish it off with a second barrage. 

“Hey!” Barret rushed forward and kicked the second monster away from the guy on the ground, then shoved the muzzle of his gun directly into its snarling face and blew its brains out. 

It rocked back and fell to the ground, wet fur and gore all over the place, most of it on the poor guy it had been tearing into… along with the blood no longer gushing from the guy’s throat. His eyes were half closed and his chest was still, and 

Barret touched the pocket of his cargoes, feeling the phial of phoenix down through the thick Material. Instead of pulling it out, he knelt down and pulled out a couple of gil to hold down the man’s eyelids and hopefully pay his way into some kind of paradise on the other side. 

His heart stuttered in his chest as he saw a figure in the distance, wavering at the edge of a long bridge. He remembered Cloud’s story back in Kalm about the swinging rope monstrosity that had plummeted them all down into the water — but it wasn’t a rope bridge now. It looked sturdy and safe, one good thing he guessed Shinra had done.

A flicker of lightning sliced a reflection down the edge of a bit of metal that might be a sword. He could barely see Cloud, surrounded by a milling crowd of ragged men reaching out to touch him, a flash of rain slicked golden hair and the glinting light on the sword dragging behind him the only real sight of him. 

Barret felt like he’d been injected with a straight shot of adrenaline as he burst into a ground eating run. 

“What are you doing?” 

The voice was familiar, but the cold, clammy hand grabbing his bicep wasn’t. Thin probing fingers tugged at him, but Cloud didn’t have time to look or pay attention. He told himself that it was just wet branches in his way, trying to slow him down, he had to get to the reactor.

“Where exactly do you think you’re going?” The voice was more insistent, the hands clutching at him doubling and tripling as they tried to hold him back. Where before it had almost sounded like it thought Cloud was doing something funny, now it was more irritated. 

It reminded Cloud of being constantly interrogated as a kid whenever his mom sent him to the store with the shopkeeper’s assistant following an inch behind him the entire time to make sure Cloud, who had never stolen a damned thing in his life, didn’t rob them blind. They’d measured every single gram of dry goods Cloud asked for at the counter, while standing in line behind another person he’d watched the man give the pretty woman a wink and spilled a half scoop more into each of hers. 

“Gotta find Zack stop Sephiroth from… whatever he’s doing. Gotta get the sword to… give it to…” Cloud dropped the buster to the wet and muddy ground, swiping at the feeling of fingers fluttering against his arms and wrapping around his wrists. He floundered as he was surrounded by the shadows that had been following him all along. “Let go,” he muttered under his breath, soft and desperate as he tried to break free. 

The voice hummed and said, “Interesting, is this a dream, or a memory? Either way, you know the truth, you know you failed, like the habitual failure you are.”

“I’ll,” Cloud bit out, reaching down and grabbing the heavy-ass weapon he’d let fall and swung it in a shallow arc that made the shadows shift out of its orbit, “show… you. Not a… not a failure.”

He sucked in a gasping breath, pain lancing through his head from one temple through the other as though he’d been shot. Pale smiles and silver hair flickered in the edges of his vision, Sephiroth’s smirk mocking him from all sides as though 

Cloud saw him through the aura of his migraine that turned the empty air around him into a series of funhouse mirrors that didn’t show his own reflection but his worst nightmare instead. 

“I’ll…” Cloud swayed slightly, silver strands gleaming in moonlight and flickering with burning cinders wavered at his side before he reached out and shoved it away. “I’ll show you.”

The shadows trying to hold him back retreated and Cloud lowered the weapon, letting the tip of it dig into the mud again and he began to drag it behind him as he made his plodding way up the mountain. 

“I’ll show you! This time…” Cloud hissed, fighting through the pain in his head, “this time I’ll kill you.”

“Oh…” The voice was back to being amused as though Cloud were its favorite source of entertainment. “Well then. I’ll be waiting, Cloud.”

Cloud redoubled his efforts to keep climbing. The urge, the need, the burning desire to get to the reactor welled up in him, choking his breath and closing his throat with panic. What if he wasn’t in time? He hadn’t been before, he’d… Cloud would kill him, he had to, had to avenge… Sephiroth had been Cloud’s hero, everything Cloud had wanted to be. Everything Cloud had ever wanted, less than twenty four hours ago… 

“My everything…” The words slipped out, easing the feeling of being strangled as he brushed past the shadows gathered around him and continued on.

The shadows trailed after him, stopping a few feet back as he came to a stumbling halt at the edge of a precipice. Like the SOLDIER and trooper before, half of him saw cracked wood with shredded bits of rope dangling down into the empty dark below, and the other half saw a bridge stretching off into the darkness. There was a thick mist rising from the river below, and the illusory bridge seemed to disappear halfway across, while the empty chasm was simply filled with endless dark. 

No amount of squinting or eye-crossing would get the images to line up, and Cloud stood hesitant, squeezing his right eye shut before doing the same with the other and trying to figure out which was real.

The lingering shadows crowded closer, a thin chest pressing against Cloud’s back and nudging him forward. He tried to brace his feet but dizziness swamped him as cold hands began to push him towards the edge. He’d almost died here twice already, once as a boy, once as a soldier, and he didn’t want to try his luck a third time.

“I have to…” Cloud swayed backward, his weight caught by half a dozen hands that steadied him.

The voice was impatient now, and its chapped and frozen lips touched his ear, “Cloud, I’m waiting. You had something to show me, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” Cloud nodded, chin jerking up and down as he let himself be surrounded and guided towards his destiny.

Barret threw himself at the group of black robed men, being as gentle as he could in his fear as he dragged them away from Cloud. He grabbed the back of Cloud’s leather harness as yanked him back before he could set one foot on the bridge. He wasn’t sure why, there was no reason to when he could see how shiny and new that bridge was, but if Cloud’s bare foot touched it something irreversibly bad would happen. 

His hand was shaking as he dragged the SOLDIER a few feet away, and turned him around to face him with his hand on his shoulder. 

Just for a second, just a trick of the light, Cloud’s eyes reflected up at him like the Mako poisoned wolves, then he blinked and it was gone. There was a span of a few heartbeats as Cloud’s blank expression slowly shifted, sense rising up in Cloud’s eyes the same way it had in Gongaga but without that weird smile that had preceded the violent rampage he’d gone into against the troopers and… and then he’d almost killed Tifa. 

Barret steadied him instead of backing away the way his animal hind brain told him to — Cloud… Cloud was a SOLDIER, and everyone who wasn’t a brainwashed fan of the lot of them knew that they were monsters. Tamed ones, cleaned up and put in uniforms, but monsters all the same. 

Cloud though, he’d never been one til that one moment and he hadn’t done it again.

“Cloud?” Barret gave him a little shake, and Cloud’s face tilted up and he frowned.

“Barret?” Cloud’s voice was softer than it had ever been, the expression on his face more confused than his usual pout.

“Odin’s fucking balls,” Barret gritted out, dragging Cloud into a hug, not caring that this was Odin’s actual mountain the least little bit. “Don’t fuckin’ scare me like that, you hear me?”

Cloud clutched at Barret’s front with one hand, the other still locked around the hilt of his sword. Even when he had both free, his arms were too short to really wrap around Barret in a hug unless he was sitting in Barret’s lap. No matter how strong he was, Barret always felt like Cloud was in dire need of a sandwich. No matter how those arms were muscled, they still felt thin to him, and no matter how firm his abs were, they were framed by a snatched waist that he could almost wrap his hands around. 

“Don’t leave me like that.” Barret pulled back and gave Cloud a slight shake. “You hear?”

“Sorry,” Cloud said, half turning to look at the bridge, and Barret wondered what it was he was seeing.

Whatever it was, Cloud leaned away from Barret for a second before he shook him again.

“You awake?” Barret asked, voice shaking slightly. When he’d seen Cloud surrounded, just like the SOLDIER only a few hours ago, he had felt the same sick grief he’d had when finding Myrna’s body, the feeling of complete failure and betrayal sticking in his throat and pinching his guts as he’d been certain he was too late.

“Hey! Cloud, baby, you look at me!” Barret dragged Cloud back away from the bridge and walked around him, still holding onto his arm and blocking the sight of the mountain and the obscene reactor perched on its ravaged peak. Somehow, that did it, and Cloud’s feet firmed under him and he stood up straight with an even more baffled look on his face.

“Barret?” Cloud licked his lips and glanced around them. If he hadn’t already been deathly white in the blue glare of his clip light, he thought Cloud might have gone pale. “Where are we?”

“’Bout halfway to the ass-end of gods-damned nowhere is where you’re at,” Barret said, relief making his shoulders drop and his gun nearly dragged to the ground like Cloud’s sword. 

He pulled Cloud back into another hug, and this time Cloud relaxed into it, letting out a shuddering breath that Barret could feel more than hear over the rain that was starting to let up a bit. 

“Don’t scare me like that,” Barret said softly, cupping the back of Cloud’s head when he looked up at him, “I can’t lose you too, can’t lose any of ya’ll, but fuck if you’re more important than ya should be.

“That sounds bad,” he realized, stumbling over his words, “not that you’re not important, you’re important.”

“I get it,” Cloud interrupted him, looking up when Barret’s hold on him loosened enough that his face wasn’t crushed to Barret’s chest, “I do. I get it.”

It sure as hell wasn’t a declaration of undying love or anything, and Barret had told himself he wouldn’t ever love anyone like that again. His heart had been bigger once, big enough to fit three people in all together, but it had shrunk after he’d lost them, just enough room for Marlene. Not enough room for himself, but he didn’t deserve that anyway.

Cloud licked water from his lips, and Barret wasn’t sure if that was an invitation or a reflex. Either way, he ducked down and brushed his mouth against Cloud’s, pushing warmth from his mouth into the other man’s, more resuscitation than passion. 

Cloud’s mouth was cold and Barret could feel his teeth chattering even though Cloud was kissing him back harder than Barret had begun.

The other’s hand wound into Barret’s shirt tightened and he gave a little yank and made a noise in his throat he had never heard before. 

They’d never done this before.

They fucked to burn off stress, or in that ‘life affirming’ way that Aerith joked about the first time Barret had caught her and Tifa making out behind a bush after an especially knock down, drag out fight with a whole pack of monsters in the Grasslands. 

That was how it had started, and that’s how it had continued up until now. 

When had they started cuddling after? They talked strategy and logistics at night anyway, but eventually it had turned into some weird kind of pillow talk. Earlier had been the first time he’d have really called it a cuddle, or admitted it was one.

Kissing… kissing involved emotions, which neither of them were really good at. Cloud got embarrassed over all sorts of things, and Barret got angry over the littlest shit when he was aggravated, and those feelings came easy. 

Cloud and Barret snarked at each other, they tossed insults back and forth as easy as their banter. Just as likely to say ‘I’ve got your back’ as ‘get your ass in gear’, but now they were both quiet in each other’s presence in a way he didn’t think they’d ever experienced before.

Cloud… didn’t know what he was doing, Barret realized that pretty early into the kiss. He wasn’t good at it, at first, but Barret’s hand on Cloud’s back shifted so he could cup the back of his head again and tilt it more at an angle so he wasn’t going to hurt his neck trying to reach up.

If Cloud got up on his tiptoes to kiss Barret harder, a little more desperately, Barret would never rag him over it. He didn’t care that Cloud wasn’t good at it, or that both of their mouths tasted like sleep, but he started to care when Cloud nearly bit his tongue because he was shivering so hard. 

He pulled back to look down at Cloud, who licked his lips again, but with a really different sort of look in his eyes before those baby blues rolled up in his head and he slumped forward against Barret’s chest. 

Cloud went limp so suddenly that Barret barely managed to keep hold of him so he didn’t totally face-plant into a puddle or slam his chin against the filthy weapon already half sunk into the sloppy earth. 

All the ones who’d been swarming around Cloud backed away in shuffling movements that churned up the mud and rocks and blood from their damaged feet. They all turned in one slow, creepy movement to look up at the reactor. There was a strange, brief second where their slack faces focused as though they could see, or hear, whatever it was that was propelling them around the Planet to no end Barret could see.

Just as suddenly, the light in their eyes was gone, and they began to shuffle back towards the town.

“Shit, fucking, what the fucking fuck?” Barret shifted Cloud in his arms, leaning him into the curve of his elbow where his gun attached so he could grab the hilt of Cloud’s weapon in his hand. He had to juggle man and sword delicately as he rearranged them, bending in half with his gun propped under Cloud’s ass so he could heft him up on his shoulder like a sack of grain. Of which, Barret thought the sack of grain would have been heavier.

“Gonna make you eat a half a chocotrice or something,” he muttered under his breath, carefully picking his way back the way he’d come, “a big fat one. And covered in butter sauce to get some damned meat on your bones.”

He thought a lot of things as he made a much more cautious way down, swearing silently as he saw another of those crazed wolves, avoiding it this time without his gun really usable. The rain must have scared away most of the other fiends, and the only other thing he saw was the robed men stumbling alongside and in front of them.

“Gonna get you some tags, and a bell, and maybe a fuckin’ baby leash,” he told Cloud as they got down into the foothills, the roof of the mansion just visible through the trees, “with a tonberry backpack and everything.” They’d had those for sale in the Gold Saucer’s haunted hotel gift shop, alongside purses in the shape of coffins and pencil cases patterned in bats and skulls. 

Marlene’s had been a battered second hand chocobo, bright pink with a neon green leash thing on it. She’d never argued about it the way some kids did, even with her endless cheerful optimism she’d been scared of strangers a lot of the time. He still didn’t let her go outside without him, she was only four, and he had to push that thought aside as he hefted Cloud up a few inches when he started sliding forward.

He’d see his girl one day, but he had a problem on his hands right now.

Cloud hadn’t moved since he’d passed out, not even when Barret kicked the mansion’s front door closed, propping Cloud’s sword up beside it as he flipped the six locks he was sure he’d done up before too.

Barret brushed off a bunch of trash from a moth eaten love seat, settling Cloud onto it and looking him over. He seemed sound asleep, and Barret couldn’t help but press his fingers to the side of Cloud’s neck to feel his pulse and lean close to listen to his breathing. 

He’d been out in the freezing rain without any shoes on, and Barret didn’t want to know what was under the thick layer of drying crap all over his feet. 

Cloud’s eyelashes fluttered against his cheeks, the fake candles all around them casting shadows on his face and making him look older and even more tired than he usually did. He reached up and rubbed at his face, then opened his eyes to stare at his wet hand.

“What the…” Cloud sat up, bracing his hands on his knees as he looked up at Barret, finally, finally awake and aware of what was going on around him.

“You went on a little march, SOLDIER boy,” Barret said, reaching out and messing up Cloud’s already destroyed hairstyle, blond strands plastered to his forehead and cheeks. “Had to go pick you up more’n halfway to the reactor.” He crouched down so Cloud didn’t have to crane his neck up to look at him, quietly admitting, “You scared me to fuckin’ death.” 

“I’m sorry,” Cloud replied, shaking his head slightly and wiping his hair out of his face. “I guess I was dreaming about… what happened. Should’ve just slept in the inn, even if it would be uncomfortable.”

“Still might have happened, cause bad memories and shit,” Barret said, adding, “I had my own after we left Corel, all my demons flying around them broken stones. Seems like yours are haunting the mountain too.” 

“Yeah.” Cloud nodded, turning his head to the door and looking at his sword. “Oh fuck, what happened?”

“You was dragging it the whole way.” Barret scratched the stubble on his chin, “Any idea why you didn’t have it on your back?”

“Cause I didn’t when I was…” Cloud trailed off, eyebrows pinching together and eyes dropping closed for a second. Whatever he was about to say never came out, before he groaned and said, “My feet are killing me.”

“Yeah,” Barret drawled, “happens when you walk halfway up a mountain as spiky as you without shoes on. That what happened to you? You look up at the mountain so long your hair stood on end?”

“Funny.” Cloud ran his hand back through his wet hair and Barret could see the fine tremor in his fingers as he started to shiver. 

He wasn’t sure whether Cloud was just cold or something more, something worse. Barret would be pretty freaked out in his shoes… or lack of them, whatever. 

“Do you think this place has hot water?” Cloud asked, dropping his head onto the cushioned back of the little couch.

“Let’s go find out.” Barret shrugged, and bent down scooped Cloud up like he’d done on the mountain and tossed him over his shoulder, slapping Cloud on the ass once he had him where he wanted him.

“Hey! What gives?!” Cloud struggled, but not nearly as well as he could have, and Barret figured that had more to do with the way his body was starting to shake with cold or a reaction to how he might have died sleepwalking off a cliff or something. 

Barret fought down his own shiver. That wasn’t even a good joke, this whole mountain was a death trap from top to bottom. 

“Your feet are fucked up as it is, and there’s broken glass and shit on the floor here. Probably literal shit from the rats crawling around and those bats in the attic too.” 

Barret turned into the room he’d washed his hands in the night before. He couldn’t remember if the water had ever gotten warm, he was exhausted and just wanted to lay down at the time. The soap had been so old he’d had to scratch it up with his fingernails to get it to lather so cleaning everything else up would be a chore, he knew.

“If it doesn’t get hot I’ll just wash off in the sink.” Cloud was grumbling under his breath until Barret let him down to sit on top of the old toilet where he pulled his foot up onto his knee and hissed at the damage. He flinched a bit as he began to pick at his skin, peeling open blisters that had debris trapped inside of them.

Barret was only sort of used to that, and wondered if that sort of thing was in the SOLDIER brochures they used to hand out before and during the war to get recruits. He doubted ‘picking shrapnel from wounds that heal over the bits’ wasn’t ever in there.

He went to work removing his gun while Cloud did that, flipping the hidden catches and digging his fingers into the grooves and giving it a hard twist. 

Disarming himself, well the pun wrote itself he had to admit, was the most vulnerable thing he’d ever experienced to date. He did it whenever they slept somewhere with four walls that were sturdy enough to give him the time to get it back on. In Midgar, he’d had a sidearm he kept in a hidden place on the head of his bed, something small he could quickly grab if something went wildly off the rails.

There was also a sense of relief as the giant chunk of metal popped off into the sink where he wiped sweat out of the cup and did the same with what was left of his lower arm. He rubbed at his stump for a moment, feeling pins and needles shoot up his arm and somehow feeling like it went up the side of his neck and into his head. 

Doc Sheiran had said it was a kind of phantom pain — where most people felt like their arm was still there, or felt pain in the part that was long gone. Barret got a weird sort of flashback to when it had happened. He could feel the weight of Dyne dropping away and what was left of his arm recoiling back with him when their arms had been blown to bits. 

He’d hoped he’d have gotten some kind of, he guessed a doctor or maybe Aerith would say, ‘closure’ after actually getting to bury the man he’d loved, but instead of every once in a while like it had been, now he felt it every time.

Trying to distract himself, Barret shucked his vest off and loosened his belt as he looked around the bathroom. It was all marble and gold with some wood here and there that was probably some rich people type of wood that cost hundreds of gil for a splinter.

Even the toilet was like that, and while it had probably been super fancy back in the day, it just looked dated as hell now with a wooden seat that would have been polished shiny and all gold fixtures. Under Cloud’s ass there was a big monogram, triangular instead of diamond shaped the way the Shinra logo had turned out later on. It was hard to imagine old man Shinra growing up here.

He poked around and found some more soap and shampoo that didn’t smell toxic, along with some brand new towels that had been packed in plastic. He grimaced at the same monogrammed S embroidered on them.

More than anything, he wondered why no one had cleaned this place out of precious metals before now. The mirror was dirty, but it had gold on it too, still shiny in places under the grime. 

“Oh, that’s ‘cause it’s all fake,” Cloud said when Barret asked, shrugging off his pauldron and unhooking it from the leather harness. His hands were still shaking, but Barret didn’t point it out. He turned over the electromagnet that connected his weapon to the harness and switched it on, then held it up towards the mirror, and it shot towards it with a loud crack when it connected. Gold paint flaked off around it, showing the metal underneath. 

“There’s fake gold everywhere,” Cloud muttered, drooping down with a yawn and propping his elbows on his knees, “fake marble too. If you pick at the tiles over there you can see it's just some kind of plastic sheet on top of the plaster tile.”

Barret found exactly what Cloud was talking about when he leaned into the big walk-in shower. There were marks where someone had done just what Cloud said, chiseling at the tiles and then leaving the broken ones where they lay. He kicked them out of the way before turning the tap marked with a red glass marble made to look like an itty bitty piece of Materia experimentally.

There was a creak and whine before a little burst of water spat out of the shower-head, the air in the line making the pipes clank a few times before the pressure evened out. The water was a rusty red, and it took longer for that to clear out than it did for it to get hot. The steam smelled off, like old republic half-gil coins, and Barret decided he was absolutely not interested in what the stuff caked around the drain in the corner was when he figured out that’s where the smell was coming from. 

“Hope that didn’t wake up the asshole downstairs,” Cloud said, brushing Barret off when he tried to pick him up again and stood up carefully. 

Barret didn’t grab him, just happened to have his arm in the right place for Cloud to steady himself on. 

It was easy to know what to do for Cloud when he was hurt or tired, actually, cause Barret was the exact same way. Shrugging off any offer of help that was too pushy, not trusting it in the slightest. It was one thing to trust someone with your life in combat, it was something else to trust someone when you’re alone.

Especially alone and naked as both of them stripped off their clothes and maneuvered together into the shower. It was definitely the biggest one Barret had ever been in, and he appreciated the hell out of that as he ducked his head under the spray — only having to lower his head an inch or two, instead of bending down a whole foot to get his scalp wet. 

They scrubbed up mostly in silence, punctuated by their usual comments like ‘can you get my back where I can’t reach?’ and ‘hey asshole stop taking up all the water I’m freezing here!’

If Cloud wasn’t literally freezing his little ass off, Barret might have put a hand on his head and held him out of the stream on purpose while making sounds of satisfaction under the hot spray. Instead, this time, he grabbed Cloud by the shoulders and switched places with him. 

If he’d looked like a sad, wet kitten in the rain, he looked like a feral cuahl with his arms crossed over his chest when Barret squeezed shampoo onto the top of his head. “Here, lemme do the work and you get warm.”

“I can wash my own hair.” Cloud would have sounded a lot tougher if he wasn’t still shivering a bit. “I actually have two hands.”

Barret didn’t rise to the bait, he never did anymore. “Yeah but my one hand his bigger’n both of yours put together, so I got this.”

If asked, he knew, and probably Barret knew too, Cloud would never admit that he leaned into Barret’s thick fingers digging into his scalp and massaging soap into his hair. He had his arms crossed defensively over his chest, more because he was cold than that he was irritated, but again they both knew that and didn’t have to say anything.

When the hell had Barret become the person who seemed to know Cloud the most, out of everyone in their group? 

It wasn’t easy for Cloud to get close to people, it never had been, and he’d had very few he’d have been comfortable sharing a hotel room with over the years let alone sharing a shower, or a bed. 

When had they started sharing a bed, instead of Cloud just riding Barret’s dick so both of them could get off and relax enough to sleep? They’d dropped into their own beds afterward most of the time, but the last place had only one big bed per room and Nanaki had wanted to play Queen’s Blood in the taproom downstairs. 

They hadn’t really had a choice but to lay down together, but they’d certainly had a choice to lie face to face while jerking each other off under the blankets. They could have retreated to opposite sides of the bed after cleaning up, but somehow that had felt more awkward than what had ended up happening.

Cloud had woken up with his face smooshed against Barret’s chest, his dog tags imprinted on Cloud’s cheek and Cloud’s hair in Barret’s open mouth. After that, well, it was cheaper to get a room with one bed, because Nanaki liked to curl up in an arm chair like an actual cat and be able to look out at the stars so they only needed one.

And then in the desert it had gotten a lot colder at night, almost as cold as a Nibelheim winter, and that was sharing warmth. Everyone knew when in a cold environment it was better to get naked to share body heat pressed together for full effectiveness. If that togetherness turned into Barret under the covers sucking Cloud’s dick as he put a pillow over his face and bit all the way through it, well that was just… you know… 

He was lying to himself.

Cloud was great at lying to himself.

He didn’t know what had happened earlier, he barely remembered it, but what he knew was that he’d been alone and he was pretty awfully tired of being alone.

There had been a little while after Gongaga, where he’d started pushing everyone away. 

He didn’t want to hurt anyone, he hadn’t meant to hurt Tifa. 

In his memory, and this is what scared the hell out of him then and still did, that wasn’t even Tifa there at all. 

He wasn’t sure who he’d thought it was, really, but they wanted to hurt him and he was just trying to…

But yeah, he’d tried distancing himself, and even Aerith had been wary of him for a while. The only one who’d got close to him there for a bit was Yuffie, and Cloud still thought that was because she had a dire lack of both self awareness and survival instinct, which was pretty bad for a ninja. Or maybe she was fucking great at it and everything else was an act… nah.

But Barret had tricked him into talking about it, which it was pretty hard to get out of a conversation when a man about two and a half times his size had him in a mating press and grinding against his prostate for the entire thirty minutes he had Cloud all to himself.

Barret, apparently, was used to being afraid he was going to hurt the people around him. It should have been obvious in hindsight, Barret was literally armed at all times very visibly, and people gave him a very wide berth when he was excitedly gesturing with both hand and gun as he spoke. Cloud had thought, up until then, that he’d not actually cared if people were afraid of him.

After that… after Barret had got Cloud so overstimulated he cried, and that was the only reason he’d cried he’d swear even now, and Cloud had admitted how scared he was that he’d hurt someone and not mean to… He started paying as much attention to Barret as Barret had apparently been paying to Cloud for who knew how long.

The man was loud, he was aggressive. He was as violent as he was protective.

But he was also warm, and helpful, and shockingly gentle when something fragile was in his arms.

Cloud didn’t like feeling fragile, but it was hard to feel anything else when Barret stepped under the water with him, pulling Cloud against his chest so he could scrub the back of Cloud’s head and down his neck shoulders. The bar of soap was rough on his skin til it softened up, water loosening whatever layer of dirt had filmed over it and letting it lather up. 

Slowly, Cloud started warming up, teeth no longer gritted together against them chattering. His hands and feet had felt numb when he’d woken up, and now they were tingling with pins and needles as they warmed up which was a little worse now that he could feel the injuries to his feet. He’d missed something in his left heel for sure, and Barret never missed anything, so when he winced and put all his weight on the other foot he noticed.

“Lemme look.” Barret rinsed his hand and the soap off, putting it back in the little cup on the wall where he’d found it. 

“It’s not that bad,” Cloud tried to insist, but was already pulling his foot up and leaning against the tile wall to let him look. 

Barret tapped a place about an inch from the center of Cloud’s foot with a fingernail. “Right here, you’re gonna have to get it with your little twig fingers though, I’ll just end up pushing it back in.”

“If you try and make that some kind of sex joke,” Cloud muttered, only half threateningly, as he bent in half to see what was wrong. His fingernails were a little longer than he liked to keep them, but that was good for scraping through the thin membrane of skin that had healed over the injury. He was used to it by now, but it still stung when he peeled it open and pulled out a tiny splinter of wood and tossed it into the open drain. 

“All better?” Barret asked, and maybe Cloud shouldn’t have been the one to turn that into a sex joke, a really bad one, because Barret’s question wasn’t just about the splinter.

“Dunno.” Cloud shrugged one shoulder, and hated the fact that for some reason his face felt hot.

Had they actually kissed? Had Cloud fainted after being kissed for the first time? He really should be a lot more worried that his mind was slipping, that he was getting further and further from understanding why he was doing things, but suddenly he was very worried about how obvious it must have been to Barret that he’d never kissed anyone before and whether he’d sucked at it or not.

Apparently Cloud’s ambivalent shrug was enough to encourage Barret, who was lathering up the soap in his hand again and washing himself as he looked at him with darkened eyes. 

Cloud was exhausted — he’d not actually slept, he’d just been sleepwalking up a dangerous mountain in the rain in the middle of the night, it was a wonder he wasn’t dead in a ravine right now and maybe that was why he dropped down to his knees when Barret had finished cleaning himself and rinsed off his dick so it was nice and clean for Cloud’s mouth.

“I mean, you know,” he said, resting his hands on Barret’s thighs and curling his fingers into the thick pelt of hair running down them, “thanks for coming to get me and everything and I’m gonna just shut up now.”

Barret groaned when Cloud licked a stripe up his cock, the heavy length of it not hard yet but it twitched in interest immediately. 

“That’s…” Barret stepped back and Cloud’s hands fell to his sides, and he hated the fact that he wanted to bite his lip nervously. He hadn’t done that since he was a kid. Barret had never actually… rejected Cloud’s advances. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Sorry.” Cloud got back to his feet, feeling numb and cold in an entirely different way as he turned to step out into the bathroom. He didn’t really want to put his wet clothes on but what else did he have to wear, maybe if he put them under the hot water an got the mud out it wouldn’t be that bad and —

“Get your scrawny ass back in here,” Barret said, his voice way too gentle compared to the words but Cloud had been starting to learn that was kind of the way he was all the time if anyone took the time to notice.

Cloud was pulled against Barret’s chest again, and his hug was tighter, as tight as it had been on the mountain, his fingers digging into Cloud’s shoulder.

“You scared me,” Barret said, and his breath came out a little shaky, “I dunno what you remember before you passed the fuck out, but I thought you were going away from us, from me, like… like those other SOLDIERS, like Doc Sheiran had warned you ‘bout.”

“You heard that?” Cloud had thought the doctor was being quiet, patient confidentiality and shit, but apparently not. His hands curled into helpless fists at his sides. He hated this. He hated that it was something he couldn’t fight, his own mind and body more of a threat than any weapon or monster he’d ever come up against.

“I was scared as hell I’d get up there and it’d be too late or some shit.” Barret rubbed circles into Cloud’s wet skin, soothing and comforting, but Cloud couldn’t relax the way he’d like to.

He opened his mouth, then closed it, struggling to get out the words.

“I’m…” He uncurled his fists and rested his hands on Barret’s chest, curling his fingers into the rough hair, the words grating out of him, “I’m scared to death, man.”

“I ain’t Aerith,” Barret said, “I’m not all bubbly and full of peace and hope and all that shit, so I can’t say nothin’ bad is ever gonna happen. That’s halfway an act with her anyway, she’s lived a lot of the bad things that can happen in this fucked up world. But what I will say, what I’ll promise, is if something bad does happen… I ain’t gonna let you go. We’ll figure something out, you hear me?”

Barret pulled back, reaching up and drawing the loop of ball-chain from around his neck. The little dog tags clicked together as he dropped it over Cloud’s head. 

“I uh.” Barret took a half step away and rubbed the back of his head. “Even back when I was married and had Dyne and Eleanor too, I wasn’t great at the words the way I should’ve been. I regret… I gotta lot of regrets, you know?”

He put his big hand on the side of Cloud’s face, warm brown eyes locked on his, thumb swiping across Cloud’s cheek as the hot water started to run out.

“I don’t wanna regret not telling you I love you.”

Cloud didn’t care just then whether Barret was disappointed in his abysmal lack of kissing skills. If Barret was bad at words, Cloud was an idiot with them, but he tried to show it the way he could. He lurched forward, rising up on his toes and meeting Barret halfway and their mouths crashed together. It was rougher than it had been the first time, maybe because Cloud hadn’t been entirely awake or that Barret had been afraid Cloud would push him away, but both of them were putting their all into it now. 

There was a bit of a struggle as Cloud tried to figure out what to do with his hands when he was just plain too short to put his arms around Barret’s neck, but the older man gave a soft chuckle Cloud thought he could feel on his tongue and it was Barret’s turn to get on his knees. 

Cloud sank into his embrace, Barret’s hand in his hair and the remains of his other arm around Cloud’s hip. He wrapped his own around Barret’s neck putting more effort into trying to figure out what he should be doing. Barret was the one adjusting everything at first, but Cloud could tell by the sounds he made when he did things he liked. 

They broke apart, Barret’s laugh sharper than usual when the warm water suddenly turned to ice and they had to escape the freezing cold deluge that was even more frigid than the storm had been. 

They crept back up the stairs, wet clothes gathered against their fronts as they slipped into the room they’d claimed. Nanaki didn’t wake up, or pretended not to at least, as they draped the damp fabric over other pieces of furniture to try and dry them out before slipping naked into the bed.

This time, Barret made Cloud get into the bed before him, pressing him up against the wall and wrapping his arm around him. It should have felt confining, he should be feeling claustrophobic, but he didn’t for some reason. He squirmed to roll over, putting his back against the wall and them more or less face to face. 

Barret plucked at the chain he’d put around Cloud’s neck. “I’ll get you your own next time we get some more…” His lip curled and he jerked his thumb in the general direction of the town. “More ‘hospitable’”, he said, air quotes and all. 

“So it’s going to say, what, ‘property of Barret Wallace’ or some shit?” Cloud tried to sound flippant, picking up one of the tags and rubbing his thumb across the letters and numbers impressed into its surface.

“Something like that.” Barret’s teeth were white in the dark room. “Gotta problem with that?”

Cloud thought about it for a second, letting the piece of metal drop down between them. He’d… Cloud had always wanted to just… be wanted. He’d never had that in Nibelheim, he’d never had it in Junon or Midgar, except with Zack 

He couldn’t quite get out the same words Barret had said to him, at first. “I think… I think I’m okay with that.”

Barret’s laugh was felt more than heard, traveling through his broad chest and into Cloud’s.

Did Cloud want to have regrets, if something did happen? If he degraded, like Roche, like Broden, like all the other SOLDIERS… if he’d never said anything. If all Barret had in the end was some kind of empty shell who used to be Cloud, if they couldn’t fix him somehow down the road… 

What would he want his last words to be, in case of something like that? 

He shifted closer and let Barret rest his chin on top of his head.

When Cloud had been a kid, his mom had never let him go to bed without coming into his room and telling him she loved him, even if he’d been a little shithead all day and she’d been angry with him. Maybe especially when she’d been angry. 

She’d said that the last words she wanted him to hear before going to sleep was that she loved him, so that he’d always remember she did, when he was older and she was gone. He figured, from what he’d heard about his grandfather who’d raised her, that she hadn’t had that, and wanted to make sure he did.

“I love you too.”