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“It’s just down this hall, right?”
“Third door on the left!”
“Yeah, got it. How’s our rear guard looking?”
“Oh he’s looking real fine.”
“Enough with the gossiping!” Barret snaps, racing to catch up with Jessie and Biggs. Behind him the sounds of a fight ring on, but he’s more worried about securing their escape than checking out the merc’s flowing blonde locks. As his own damn team should be, too. “Can we get this door open or not?”
Biggs shakes his head, still working the lock slowly. “It’s seeming less and less likely.”
“Then how the hell are we gettin’ out of here?!”
Biggs curses, yanking his hands away from the door, and stands roughly. He’s quick to pocket his tools, glancing around desperately for another escape.
“The intel said this was the right way out!” Jessie huffs.
“Well, clearly we got double crossed!”
“I don’t know, Barret. If we got double crossed, the entire security system would be down on us. Right now it’s just the monsters we picked up outside.”
“Yeah, but-!”
“We’ll discuss this later!” Barret interrupts, trying frantically to think up a fallback plan. They hadn’t been provided with the actual layout of the building. Just some vague instructions with some shady details, and he’s beginning to suspect there’s a lot more going on here than they’re prepared for.
“Well how are we getting out, then?!” Jessie demands, leaning forward with her hands on her hips. She’s got a scowl in place, hair bouncing wildly as she pulls back and whips her head around to look at the door again. “I could blow it up, I suppose-”
“No bombs, Jessie!”
Barret snorts. “If the security ain’t on our asses now it would definitely be up in arms once we blow a hole in the wall.”
“Has everybody forgotten that we’re fifty stories up?! Blow out the wall and the ladder goes too!”
“So we kick the door down!” Now that is an idea Barret can get behind. “No explosions and no destruction! We could just-”
“Don’t.”
As soon as the voice comes out from behind him, Barret realizes the sounds of fighting have stopped, and he knows exactly who Biggs and Jessie are smiling at. He scowls, turning to see the merc standing next to them as if he’d been there all along, expression blank as ever.
“What?” Barret snaps aggressively. He glares for equal measure, but the merc is entirely unfazed. Freakish as always, face cold and distant. It sends shivers down Barret’s spine.
This is a man that can’t be trusted, he knows. Someone who doesn’t care for anything. No emotions or fears, throwing himself into life or death situations like it’s a job - like it’s a game. Instead of an ongoing fight for their planet’s very survival.
“Kicking the door will trigger the alarms as well,” he says, and Barret snorts in response.
“And how would you know that?” Maybe he’s the damn double crosser. Playing at the friendly mercenary while sucking innocent people in need dry of money. Hell, maybe he still works for Shinra.
Maybe Tifa was wrong.
The merc blinks at him for a moment, expression fluttering strangely, and it makes a different kind of uncomfortable feeling settle in Barret’s gut.
Just like he said: shifty. Shifty as all hell.
But Barret trusts Tifa’s judgement. Trusts that she’s got Avalanche’s best interests at heart, despite her doubts, so he pushes the feelings aside and grits his teeth against the surge of wounded pride.
“Then how the hell else are we gettin’ out of here, Mr. Expert?” Though he can’t quite keep the mocking tone from his voice. Hell, it’s not like the merc gives a shit anyway.
“The elevators.”
“The elevators?”
The arrogant little shit gives him a look like he’s lost a few brain cells just being in the same vicinity, and Barret has never been hit harder with the urge to punch a smug look right off someone’s smarmy face. Luckily for the merc, Jessie speaks before he can follow through with it.
“This building doesn’t have any working elevators,” she says, “our inside man told us they were all down due to-”
“He lied.”
“Oh come on!” Biggs explodes, “So we really did get double crossed!”
“I’m telling you if he’d betrayed us he would have triggered the alarms!”
“Hey!” Gaia, sometimes Barret feels like the dad of the world’s oldest teenagers, “Enough, we’ll talk about this later, okay? When we ain’t seconds away from getting caught with our pants down.”
“He wasn’t double crossing you, he was lying,” the merc points out unhelpfully, and he’s got Jessie up in arms again just like that.
Barret cuts an irritated hand through the air to silence them, then looks pointedly at the merc. “Where are these elevators?” He asks calmly. Because he’s got a team to keep safe, and if Jessie and Biggs are able to can it about their double crossing inside man, then Barret can sure as hell take the merc’s lead for a few minutes until they’re all out of harm’s way.
The merc gives a sharp nod that practically screams military before turning to backtrack down the hallway. They follow him over fallen monster bodies and the charred remains of some beast, struggling to keep up as the blonde basically dances over the corpses he’d cut down. For someone so small the kid sure moves fast, and he’s turning abruptly down another hallway before they can do anything about it, disappearing from view.
There’s a beat as Barret turns the corner where he thinks - knows - that this is it . This is the moment of betrayal. The merc will be waiting around the corner with a raised sword or a group of Shinra soldiers, ready to end it all.
But then they do turn around the corner, and all he sees is another long, empty hallway with two elevators at the end. Cloud is standing in front of one of them, looking it up and down with a pinched expression, and as Barret finally gets close enough to get a good look at it he knows exactly why.
“Hm,” the merc grumps, and Barret is hard pressed to agree with him, “I thought they’d be bigger.”
He hears Biggs bark a laugh out from behind them, Jessie springing to their side at the same time. She grins lasciviously and gives the merc the type of once over that should never stray from the pages of a porn magazine, and Barret almost has a mind to reprimand her about sexual harassment in the workplace before he remembers who the hell he’s dealing with.
“There’s no way we’ll all fit,” she crows delightedly.
Barret sighs. “Well we’re going to have to make it work.”
“No way,” Biggs laughs, “we’re splitting up-” he raises his hands defensively against Barret’s look of reproach, stepping towards the elevator furthest from him with an apologetic wince, “-no offense man but I’m not keen on dying squeezed between your 700 pounds of pure muscle and Jessie’s knife elbows.”
Barret opens his mouth to argue, but before he can Jessie jumps over to the same elevator, babbling a mile a minute. “If we split it evenly we won’t be in any danger, alright? We’ll protect each other. Biggs and I are both average sized, so we’ll go together, and you can go with Cloud! Since you’re big and he’s tiny.”
Barret doesn’t even have to look at the merc to know he’s burning holes in them at the words, but he barely manages a cut off “you can’t-” before they’re both piling into their elevator and waving smug, cheery goodbyes through the quickly narrowing doorway.
And then they’re gone.
Barret scowls at the descending elevator, but the short, irritated breath released next to him has his eyes shifting to the merc. He looks stoic as always, only slightly more tense than usual, but Barret swears he heard the guy sigh.
“Let’s go, then,” he says, stepping into the small space of the second elevator.
“I’m the one calling the shots here, merc.”
“Whatever. Just get in, we don’t have all day.”
Barret’s lips thin angrily, but he refrains from responding. Instead he shoves himself into the elevator, jostling the other man roughly in the process, and slams a fist against the button for the lower floors.
“I’d better get my money this time.”
Barret grits his teeth, breathing out slowly as he focuses on the doors sliding closed in front of him. “You’ll get your damn money, merc,” he hisses, “now shut the hell up.”
The merc doesn’t even flinch at his tone. He steps further back into the elevator, away from Barret’s bulk, and crosses his arms in front of his chest. He lowers his head, too, and Barret is reminded of the time he’d fallen asleep during their first mission not too long ago.
He scowls. “You’re a damn freak, you know that?”
The merc just ignores him. Probably already conked out, despite the rattling, rickety descent.
Barret snorts at him and shifts to lean against the wall. “Some super soldier,” he grumbles to himself, watching the numbers tick down excruciatingly slowly.
It’s about when they reach level fifteen that the merc actually opens his eyes again, looking up at the numbers with a slight frown.
“What, this ride goin’ too slow for you, Shinra?”
He turns to Barret with narrowed eyes, opening his mouth to say something, and is almost immediately cut off with a jarring click of the teeth as the elevator slams to a stop. He staggers, eyes widening in alarm, but Barret doesn’t see much more before he’s sliding gracelessly to the elevator floor.
“Shit!” Barret bellows, slamming a fist against the worthless thing as it rattles violently, knocking his sideways, before finally calming down again.
He huffs, hauling himself to his feet, and stares at the elevator doors incredulously. “What the hell was that?!”
There’s no answer from his current companion, but Barret could care less at this point. This is not a good place to be trapped, he knows. They’ve essentially put themselves in a kill box and served themselves up to the police, who could literally be arriving at any moment.
“We’ve got to get the hell out of here,” he grunts, squeezing his fingers between the doors and attempting to pull them open. They screech as they part, grinding against a solid concrete wall, and he kicks at it experimentally. “Shit.”
So much for that plan, he supposes.
He hovers by the door for a second, trying to formulate a solid backup strategy, and for the first time notices the merc’s glaring silence. He hasn’t said anything since they stopped. He hadn’t even moved to help open the doors, and Barret’s earlier suspicions come flying back with the force of a freight train
He tries to keep them at bay. Tries to remind himself that he doesn’t have to like the guy - that Tifa recommended him - but that’s hard to do when it was the merc who led them here and allowed them to get trapped. Who now stands silent and unhelpful behind him, mako eyes glinting in the dim, flickering lighting, like a statue dedicated to everything wrong with the world.
He whirls around, fist clenched and gun raised, ready to tear the traitor apart, only to see wide, vivid blue eyes instead of narrowed challenging ones. A chill, closed off expression and slack lips.
“What the hell?”
Barret hesitates uneasily, then steps forward and lowers his gun a fraction. The merc doesn’t even blink at the heavy weaponry pointed straight at him.
“Hey merc,” he snaps out, huffing as he still gets no response, “if this is some kind of twisted prank or trap, you’re gonna have hell to pay.”
Still nothing. Barret swallows roughly, gun lowering even further.
“This some kind of weird SOLDIER ritual that I don’t know about?” He asks, but this time the words are weak.
Those are not the eyes of someone planning a betrayal. They look startlingly similar to the eyes of someone having an episode.
He lowers his gun completely, feeling foolish for having raised it in the first place. Even if the merc had been a traitor, bullets in an enclosed metal space wouldn’t have done anyone any favors, least of all him.
He closes his eyes for a second, calming the sting of anger he can still feel in his heart, and opens them again with a clearer mind. Then, for the first time since they’d entered the elevator, Barret takes a good look at the merc. Actually looks at him, like he would one of his own instead of the enemy, and realizes with dawning horror that the kid’s terrified. Fingers white with the pressure of squeezing stark bruises into his arms, eyes wide and shoulders taut like a bowstring. His whole body is screaming discomfort.
How had he missed this?
“Damnit!” Barret curses loudly, and it’s only because he’s looking so closely that he catches the minute twitch of the merc’s fingers at his outburst. The subtle way he leans back, lips parting with short, heavy breaths as the rise and fall of his shoulders becomes harsher.
It’s looking a lot like a panic attack to Barret, but it’s hard to tell with such innocuous cues. The merc would appear frozen in place to anybody who didn’t know better. Hell, he’d probably just appear stoically uninterested.
And he’s completely out of commission. Barret doesn’t think the kid’s even capable of speaking right now, with how tight his muscles are, throat working soundlessly.
“Gaia, you’ve got it bad, kid.”
Barret intentionally softens his stance as he approaches, steps light but telegraphed. Open, easy movements that get him halfway across the elevator before the merc’s gaze snaps to him. There’s a hesitance in the flash of expressions across his face, as if he isn’t quite sure what mask to put on, that leaves a strange sort of vulnerability in the sheen of his eyes.
Confusion. Blank, empty confusion.
Shit. This is worse than he’d thought.
He should have known - hadn’t even considered -
“Hey,” Barret tries, tone low, and the eyes find his lips like moths to flame, but it’s obvious the merc’s not seeing them.
“Can you hear me, Cloud?”
Still nothing.
“Can you see me?”
Cloud actually blinks once at that, brows furrowing, and a fraction of the fear fades for a moment, something like recognition entering his eyes. Barret grasps at the opportunity.
“Do you know who I am?”
“Tifa…”
“Tifa?!”
“Tifa’s friend. It’s - Barret,” he gasps, voice raspy, and Barrett reels a bit at the sound of his name on Cloud’s lips.
“Right, that’s me. Do you remember-” and Barret realizes that was the wrong thing to say as soon as Cloud expression changes, entire body snapping to face the solid concrete wall blocking their exit.
His breathing picks up again. Nails digging crimsons crescents into his skin as he staggers away from the walls, spinning in the center of the enclosed space and sucking in air like he’s drowning.
Barrett moves without thinking, reaching out to steady him, but Cloud whirls around with wide, panicked eyes and lashes out. His forearm connects with Barret’s chest in a savage thud, knocking him clean to the other side of the elevator.
“Don’t touch me!” Cloud yells. “Don’t-“ he curls inwards, heaving, and presses himself to the opposite wall.
“Okay.” Barret steadies himself, then raises his hand and gun as a show of peace. “Okay, I won’t touch you. I’m just right over here, and I’m staying perfectly still.”
Cloud shakes his head frantically. “There-there has to be another way out. You- the, the roof-”
“Roof wouldn’t be a good idea.” Especially not with Cloud incapacitated the way he is. And Barret definitely isn’t fitting up there, that’s for damn sure.
“So…so we’re trapped?”
“For now, but it’s probably a simple power outage. We just have to wait.” He leaves it at that, even though it’s almost physically painful to do so.
Nothing he says is going to reassure Cloud at this point, so he just lets the guy tense up against the wall, breathing shakily. He looks an absolute wreck, face wet with tears and hair matted in sweat. Paler than the moon and trembling like a leaf, he appears such a stark contrast to the usual Cloud that Barret almost has a hard time believing it’s the same person.
Except Barret more than anybody knows what PTSD can do to people, and he hates the group with a burning passion, but he can acknowledge that any SOLDIER worth a damn has probably got some traumatizing memories locked away.
Maybe Cloud isn’t so unfeeling as Barret had assumed.
But claustrophobia?! It’s a hell of a thing, and Barret would be furious that the kid hadn’t told him if he didn’t know the exact reason why. A leader is supposed to be someone you can turn to - somebody you can trust to always have your best interests at heart - and he’s failed miserably in that department, former enemy or not.
Cloud had been subtle about it, too. Good enough at hiding his reaction that Barret had taken minutes to notice. That’s not even counting the first elevator ride, even though he absolutely should. Nobody sane sleeps like that in an elevator unless they’ve got issues with it, and he damn well should have noticed something was up right then and there.
He’d been purposefully obtuse; willfully ignorant about the truth right in front of him again, and it had nearly cost him a second time.
Of course, the fact that Cloud had been so good at hiding it is a bit concerning, and Barret is beginning to get the sneaking, sickening suspicion that Cloud has been having a lot more of these episodes in his presence than he should be.
And he’s never bothered to help with a single one.
Tifa’s going to have his head for this.
She’s the one who recommended Cloud for the jobs, but Barret doubts she knows a thing about this.
Does anyone?
Barret looks up when he hears Cloud shift, watching on with dread as the other slides numbly to the floor. The look in his eyes is enough to make Barret feel as if he’s been doused in ice water, and the panting is only getting louder, more panicked and sharp. Interspersed with small, terrified whimpers that push at every single protective instinct Barret has. The ones that tell him to keep his family close and to never let them suffer. The ones that usually include Jessie and Biggs and Wedge and Tifa and now, apparently, Cloud.
Gaia, not this damn brat.
He can’t think about this right now, though. Not while one of his team is lying prone on the floor of a kill box that could start running again at any moment, no matter which particular member of his party that person is. So he pushes it all from his mind and focuses on the problem at hand.
He can deal with this later.
“Cloud, hey,” he soothes instead, voice almost a whisper, “I need you to breathe.”
Cloud chokes. Claws at his chest and kicks at the floor, head shaking wildly. “I can’t-!”
“You can.”
“It’s-it’s too small. There’s no air. I-!”
“There is air!” Mako eyes flick to him in surprise, latching on desperately, and Barret continues on in a calmer tone. “I need you to listen to me. There is air in here, but you have to breathe.”
“I can’t-”
“In,” Barret interrupts, waiting patiently through Cloud’s startled, bleary pause for the strangled breath he sucks in afterward. “Count for four seconds and hold...then out again.”
He slides forward a bit on Cloud’s ragged exhale, and pushes even further when Cloud doesn’t protest the movement. He’s watching Barret like a hawk, but Barret has the feeling he’s not seeing much.
“In,” Barret repeats, “and out.”
Cloud struggles to follow the instructions as Barret finally manages to sit directly in front of him.
There’s not a single doubt in Barret’s mind as he grabs Cloud’s hand, guiding it to his chest.
“Breathe with me.” He locks eyes with Cloud. Watches fear turn to confusion and distrust, powering right on through it. “In and out,” he instructs, sucking in a long, deep breath to show that there’s air. When he exhales, he watches Cloud do the same, eyes drifting to their overlapping fingers.
It goes on like that for a while, the elevator still remaining stubbornly in place. Cloud’s fear doesn’t seem to fade, but he slowly, methodically works away the panic, breathing in rhythm with Barret until his whole body doesn’t shake on every exhale. Until he’s almost relaxed again, eyes beginning to droop.
The way they sit is almost casual, now. As if they’re chilling on a weeklong vacation and not recovering from being trapped fifteen floors above the ground. With the press of silence between them, the urgency of the moment wearing away, Barret finds himself struck again by the absurdity of the situation.
Cloud Strife. SOLDIER. Ex-Soldier. Mercenary. It doesn’t matter.
If he told the Barret of even ten minutes ago what they’re doing right now, he’d be laughed right out of the room.
Barret sighs, ready to pull them back to their feet and forget this ever happened, for the sake of both their pride. Yet when he looks again at Cloud it's to see that he's shaking. Then he’s gasping, shoulders heaving, and Barret has a brief, panicked second to think that Cloud is having another attack before he realizes that the merc is crying. Actual, tearing sobs that wrack his entire frame as he crumples in on himself like a marionette with its strings cut.
That heated, protective surge of anger that he’s only ever felt for his team instantly comes back in full force, and Barret doesn’t even think before he’s pulling Cloud against him. Wrapping his arm around the smaller figure and pressing Cloud’s face to his shoulder, carding his fingers through soft, downy hair.
Cloud shakes against him, fisting desperately at his shirt and burrowing violently against him like the touch is too little. Not enough. And Barret tries to hold him tighter; to contain it all as it comes spilling out of him. Loud, reckless weeping and the desperate need for comfort.
And as they sit there, Cloud cradled in his arm, Barret gets the feeling that they may never recover from this, after all. But damn the pride and the image and the stupid, ridiculous facade. Like hell is he going to let another one of his family suffer for any longer than they have to. Even Cloud. Especially Cloud.