#dadBarrett

[radioactivepeasant]

Fic Prompts: Free Day Thursday

As determined by the randomizer, the two prompts I was working with were "Final Fantasy 7" and "Sick Day". Been a while since I played with FF7 characters, so I'm a little out of practice, but here we go!

The grashshrikes shouldn't have been a problem for a mercenary like Cloud. He'd fought worse -- these things weren't even sentient! It was way more of a pain to deal with Shinra gunners! But just a split second of distraction was enough to slip up where grashshrikes were involved.

Cloud fumbled for a Cure and shot a dirty look at Barrett as Jessie put down the last monster. Was it really worth it, working for this guy? Sure, it kept a roof over his head, but Cloud was pretty sick of being the target for the guy's hatred of Shinra.

Well. Currently he was pretty sick period.

"Ugh."

Cloud tipped his head back and let it smack against a wall of sheet metal.

Out of Cure materia, and all he'd done was lower the poison from "debilitating" to "knocked out for the next 24 hours". He really needed to get his hands on a Cura. Or a Curaga, but that sounded too optimistic for the way his luck tended to run.

(Had his luck always been this bad? Sure, he had some misfortune as a kid, but what about during his time as a SOLDIER? Barrett had a point: shouldn't he be able to remember?)

"Hey, you okay, bro?" Wedge crouched next to him with a worried frown. "You don't look so good."

"'M fine," Cloud growled.

The second he let on that he was still poisoned, they'd probably drop him. And then he could say goodbye to any chance of getting paid.

"Barrett, something's wrong with Cloud!" Wedge called over his shoulder, "He didn't even tell me to stop calling him bro!"

Barrett looked equal parts irate and sheepish -- decidedly unsettling in combination on his face.

He stomped over and squatted in front of Cloud to glare at him.

"What's wrong with you, merc?" he demanded.

"Nothing." Cloud rolled his eyes and shoved down the wave of nausea that produced with gritted teeth. "You've never seen someone sit down before?"

"You let that thing sting you, didn't you?"

With a jerk, Cloud stood upright. For a moment, the world tipped on its side.

He was grateful that he hadn't eaten breakfast that morning. If he'd had anything in his apartment worth eating, it all would've made an encore appearance as he tried to keep his footing.

The humiliating levels of concern on the AVALANCHE members' faces -- even Barrett -- made it clear that he wasn't going to be able to fool them.

"So do you normally try to distract people during monster fights?" he asked Barrett pointedly, "or am I just special?"

Jessie snickered. "Oooooo," she sang, "Tifa's gonna kick your butt, Barrett!"

"Knock it off," Barrett fired back, but secretly he agreed.

The middle of a fight with four grashshrikes really wasn't the place to be interrogating the kid about Shinra policies, he did know that. But the surly mercenary's penchant for brushing him off with "how should I know?" type answers was grating on his nerves. All things considered, retorting "what, you don't remember?" shouldn't have been that big of a deal -- at least, it wouldn't have been for one of his team. But Cloud wasn't one of them. And something about Barrett's irritable comment had made him literally stumble mid swing, allowing an opportunistic grashshrike an opening to sting him in the side.

And unfortunately, what with how Tifa felt about her home -- the one Shinra destroyed -- Barrett suspected that saying Cloud was responsible for his own injuries wouldn't pass muster with the formidable Miss Lockhart. And anyway, regardless of how Barrett felt about the merc, he was Tifa's friend -- Ancients only knew why. The kid had lost enough for one lifetime. No reason to add her friend to that list.

"Well at least that was the last of 'em," he grunted, then he heaved himself upright and dusted off his knees.

"Jessie, Wedge, you go turn that job in and collect the pay. We'll meet you at the 7th Heaven to divide it."

He waved his machine-gun hand at Biggs.

"C'mere, you're making sure Junior here doesn't drop dead on the way home."

Cloud didn't mind Biggs, not really. But with the way his head was pounding, and his shirt felt like sandpaper against his chest, the idea of anyone "helping" him was both unappealing and embarrassing.

"Don't touch me," he snapped, pulling away quickly.

That was a mistake, as it turned out. The world started spinning again, and having an empty stomach didn't seem to matter after all as bile ejected from his mouth.

"Eesh." Wedge scrambled back. "You know what you need?"

"Five minutes' peace without all of you running around like broody chocobos?" Cloud asked dryly. This was ignored.

"You need a gingerbeer and salted crackers," Wedge said sagely. "Once that poison's cured, anyway."

"Leave me alone," Cloud groaned.

(Don't leave me alone! I don't want to be alone!)

"Just give me a Cure and I'll be fine."

"You need a Cura, idiot," Barrett chided him, without the usual bite. "We've got one at the bar."

Without a second of hesitation, the big man threw one of Cloud's arms over his shoulders and began walking. Cloud struggled to extricate himself from Barrett's grip, but doing so just made the nausea worse.

"I can walk!" he insisted.

"Like a drunken moogle, sure," Barrett snorted. "Listen kid, Tifa will have my head if I let you go back to work in this condition. You're lucky she wasn't there to see that, or we'd both be dead men. We're goin' home."

Cloud bared gritted teeth. "I'm going to throw up on you," he threatened.

Barrett just tightened his grip and rolled his eyes.

"Like I've never been puked on before?"

On Cloud's other side, Biggs gave him a weird look, and Barrett harrumphed a little.

"My daughter, knucklehead. You never burped a baby at Leaf House?"

"Ohhhh, gotcha." Biggs looked chagrined. "Kinda thought you meant bar patrons or something."

"You honestly think Tifa would let somebody get that drunk in my bar?" Barrett shook his head almost grimly. "Who needs a bouncer when you've got her?"

Cloud wasn't sure how they got from the edge of the slums to a ratty fold-out couch in the AVALANCHE headquarters after that, honestly, but at some point Biggs deposited a Cura on his chest with strict instructions to "play nice".

Cloud had been more confused about the direction than his sudden change in location...until he turned his head and found four year old Marlene wearing a children's Mage costume, holding a toy Bouncy Materia.

Bouncy Materia? That was a thing?

"I," said Marlene with all the solemnity a preschooler could muster, "am a mage. I'm gonna heal ya. Say aaaaahhhh."

Cloud blinked at the tiny figure incredulously. "....what?"

"Say aahhh!" Marlene repeated. "Daddy said to make sure you didn't get outta bed while he makes us lunch. Biggs said you had a tummyache, so I gotta make sure you don't have a bad sick like the flu."

"....how're you going to tell that by looking at my throat?" Cloud croaked.

The little girl shrugged. "I dunno, that's what the doctor does! She looks in my throat and then she knows why I feel sick."

Cloud pondered this.

"Well," he said at last, "I don't know enough about doctors to prove you wrong. Carry on, I guess."

He began to regret that when the sparkly stickers shaped like bandages came out.

All six sheets of them.