The house had changed since she had gone to the gallery that morning. Marlene was certain of that. She knew the feeling of her house, of her father, and any of their visitors. The vice that seemed to grip this place had apparently visited while she was gone…and it was still here.

Marlene stood in the doorway, still frozen from the sudden onslaught of the new atmosphere. Her hand was still clutching her keys, which were still in the lock of the front door. Her chest tightened. This wasn't going to be a good day. It had been, really, up to that point. Her paintings were continuing to sell, and she'd closed a deal on licensing – now her paintings and their replicas could hang in every home on the planet if she was lucky….

However, judging by the feeling that made this home foreign, it seemed that her luck was running out. Oh well. It had had a good run – a 13-year run, in fact. She'd been at the top of her classes in high school, art school, and culinary school. Three months ago, as spring had peaked, she'd scored a place in the local gallery...and then it all exploded into a career. To top it all off, she could now have her cake and eat it too; with her art selling, she could play with all of her high-profile crockery if she so desired.

It had been a good run.

Now it was time to go in and see what was going to derail it all.

Marlene withdrew her key from the door and stepped into the house. She closed the door behind her carefully, the only noise being the click of the lock sliding back into place. "Daddy, I'm home." She listened for a response. None. She hung up her keys on the wall and took off her sunhat; the summer was reaching its height, and her fair skin, even with sunscreen, wouldn't stand long. She rubbed a hand up and down her bare arm, fingers drifting down to adjust the hem of her sundress. It was too wide on the bottom, she felt, even when she wore biker shorts underneath. At least the top half fit ok. Barret had told her that her mother had been quite delicate and her father slim. Perhaps she was a bit conscious about it, since she been surrounded by men like Barret (who was no small man) and girls like Tifa (who was rather voluptuous) for most of her life. She came from different genetic stock than they did, and even more different than Yuffie, who arguably was as small-boned as she was, albeit far more muscular. Well, had been. Marlene hadn't seen much of Yuffie since she became empress…always swaddled in those ceremonial robes; she could not tell whether the woman had kept her figure, improved on it, or what.

Catching sight of herself in the mirror, Marlene sighed. No, she was never going to look as good as Tifa did at her age – she was simply destined to be a waif, a brunette Twiggy or something. Her face, while pretty, didn't have enough character in it to be called a gamine – then she could pretend to be Audrey Hepburn or someone interesting like that. Just plain Marlene. Plain Marlene with hat hair…ok, she could fix that.

As her fingers quickly weaved her mussed hair into a single braid down her back, she heard a floor board from upstairs creak. "Daddy?" she called up again. Maybe he had been sleeping – trying to wake him up was normally like trying to wake the dead

"Hey, baby. When you got a minute, come up to your art room."

Marlene quickly finished doing her hair and bounced up the stairs to her studio. Barret had pulled out all the stops when he heard his daughter had been accepted to art school. He threw every art related thing he could think of in there, from a pottery wheel to a bunch of plywood for free-standing art. He even had the walls painted in a custom formula so she could actually write or draw on the walls and then erase it as her heart wished. It was perfect.

Well, it had been. Now the feelings she had felt when she entered the house were magnified and centred in this room, emanating from….

Her daddy.

Barret Wallace had aged fairly well despite everything the man had been through. He was grey in the beard and in the temples, lines deep in his face…but they were laugh lines, and that was a good thing. It wasn't the actual sight of him that told Marlene something was wrong. It was how he sat on the museum bench – the bench he'd gotten specifically so he could watch the artist at work. Hands folded in front of him, flesh one over the robotic one. Back ramrod straight. His eyebrows drawn so close together that they could almost be considered one. And then his eyes…

Barret had a rep for being a tough man, a loud man, a fearless man. However, very few people were tall enough or brave enough to look him straight in the eyes. For Barret, that was where all of his true emotions were; nothing was obscured by bravado. Today, Marlene saw something she'd only seen once before, and that was when she was…

"Daddy, are we safe?" Barret raised his eyes toward his not-so-little girl. He felt shamed that she'd seen or felt his emotions and that he was worrying her even before he told her…

"Yeah, baby, we cool. No terrorists or any of that nasty sh-stuff." Barret, unlike Cid, had eventually trained himself out of cursing around his child. "But…yeah, something's up. Sit down, hon." He patted a space beside him on the bench.

Marlene obediently sat down, eyes wide. Already she could feel tears brimming up behind them, but she couldn't let them fall. No, she wouldn't be doing anyone proud then if she was bawling before he even told her what was going on. Even though he would understand that she felt the vibes, she still didn't want to disappoint him that way. Her jaw trembled, and she grit her teeth to stop the nervous reaction.

Barret turned himself to look at her. As tall and as pretty as she was, he still remembered the days of shortness and pigtails. This was, to quote Cid upon the birth of his son, "gonna be harder than getting a St. Bernard through a cat door." He flexed his metal hand once, and then he started. "You know I went to the doctor today to see about them headaches?'

Marlene nodded.

"They ran me through all the machines – the spiny ones, the picture taking ones, the ones where they hook you up like one of them cyborg things. Don't know the names of any of them, but they gave me all those tests."

Marlene started grinding her teeth as she tried to not let her mouth pucker in, the first sign of an oncoming cry-fest. "They found something?"

Barret closed his eyes. "You were always a smart girl, Marlene. Yeah, they did." He bowed his head slightly forward and tapped the direct centre of his skull. "Right down in there. Big ol' aneurysm chillin' out. You know what that is?"

Marlene's eyes were burning, and she finally had to look down at her hands rather than her father's head. "It's, it's like when a hose dries out and the three layers in there split apart…the water goes into all three and makes it swell til…"

"Yeah." Barret sat up straight again and looked across at the wall. He swallowed as he felt his nose twitch. "Shit, I can't start blubberin' like this in front of Marlene." Wordlessly, he took her right hand in his left and continued to stare at the painting. "Earth's Rage," she'd called it. He'd taken her up to the top of old Mount Corel and she'd just snapped away on her camera, then done the painting based out of the series. It was one of his favourites. "The mofo is hiding in the middle, so the doctor's can't get at it."

Despite her efforts, Marlene felt the tears run down her face. "So one day…"

"Yeah." Barret gave up any pretences of being tough man at this point. Here he was, telling his baby girl he was going to kick the bucket at any time, and there he was, trying to be all manly and bullshit. He let himself sniff loudly as his own eyes started to leak.

"How long did they say?"

"Year at most. Prolly within the next six months or so. But it'll be real fast."

"Just boom, splat?"

"Yeah. 'xactly. Like that time we couldn't find a knife for the watermelon, and so I just put a cap in that thing's ass."

Marlene burst out laughing and crying at the same time. "A-a-and then, instead of spitting out seeds, we had to watch for shell casings." Barret grinned with all of his teeth (a scary thing if he was smiling at your from behind his gun)…and then immediately went sombre as his little girl continued to sob.

Barret wrapped his arms around her. "C'mon, baby, don't cry." Marlene sniffled loudly, trying her best. "You're a strong little lady, and cryin' won't do anything….Yeah, good girl." Despite this, Barret's own face was still wet with salt water. "I'm sorry, honey. I really am."

"I-i-it just happened…don't need to be sorry." Marlene slid her arms around Barret's neck and leaned her head on his shoulder.

"You got our friends to look at after you – Tifa an' ol' Chocobo Head an' Shera an' Cid – maybe not him, but you know." He heard a muffled sob or chuckle, he wasn't sure which. Frankly, he wasn't sure what he should be doing emotionally either. This was his mortality he was talkin' about, and there he was, calling Cloud Chocobo Head for the last(?) time.

Shit. Last times. When was the last time he was gonna hold Marlene? He hadn't been thinking about that since that whole Deep Soldier crap Valentine was dealing with had blown over. And then he'd held her like there was no tomorrow. And then there were first times….

He wasn't gonna have anymore of those. Minus dyin'. Not gonna see Marlene move out or get married (for the first and last time, he hoped), or see his own grandkids. Nope. Not unless she went out and did something like a fool, and Marlene was no fool. No. She was going to be absolutely, positively, unreliably A-OK. She had been so far. He'd done good with all the insanity that was in the world.

…But….Goddamn, he'd missed on so much with her. Always leavin' her with the gang while he went out and saved the world with new fuel and stuff. He was helpin' the planet to keep runnin', but what about her…?

She'd be fine. She had been fine then, so why not now?

Barret flexed his robotic hand slightly behind her. He'd changed up his gun arm for that doo-dad after the world almost ended. The gun had been all funky after that battle in the Northern Crater, and he'd been scared shitless that he was gonna hug Marlene one day and blow her little head off. He got worried when he went into surgery – was Marlene gonna be scared that he was dying? When he woke up, she was right there, unfazed and looking with wide eyes at his new hand. She was fine then.

Dyin' was a more permanent thing than having his pipes replaced. But she'd been dealing with worse since she'd been born. He'd gotten her momma and daddy killed and his arm blown off, but he was able to take of her. At least she was alive and she grew up pretty happy. She had Tifa and all them to keep her amused. Tifa was the best momma he could have gotten for her…little girls needed their mommas, and little boys needed their poppas. Well, boys needed their mommas, too, he'd learned over the years, but still, the basic idea worked. What would she have done, seein' what he'd seen out there with the roughnecks, trying to rebuild the planet? Marlene was a stout little filly, on the inside, if not on the outside, but she didn't need to see any of that…no, none of the grit and the cussing and the dying – she had enough of that. Almost three times now, the world had ended with her waiting for him to come home in one piece…

He always did. But now the fightin' was over, and old soldiers gotta go back home sometime. It was just his turn….Marlene would understand that.

"Baby, I've been on this planet for a long time and see so much…it's just my time to go on and mosey home…like Spike said."

Marlene pulled back from her father, lips still shut tight as she took her father's artificial hand in hers. She ran her fingers over it, still inwardly fascinated by its operation and almost life-like abilities; while he could not feel with it, it still enabled him to do things that hadn't been possible before – braiding her hair, flipping pancakes, typing (with his two index fingers) notes to her teachers, and trying to show her how to master the monkey bars…. That last endeavour was met with limited success, as he had shown why there was a weight limit on such childhood amusements.

She heard Barret continue, distantly. "I think it's better this way, now that I'm stayin' home more often. I wouldn't have wanted to go off and die without you knowin' – like that fool Cloud did to Tifa – can't believe she still married him anyway." Her hand was squeezed gently, but she didn't feel strong enough to respond. "But seriously, Marlene, if I gotta go, it's better this way than like what I was thinkin' before – blaze o' glory and all that garbage. Even if it was all for you, I rather see you…"

How could she respond to that?

"Marlene, you got me for a while more yet. You gonna talk, or am I gonna have to go call someone more talkative, like Vampy?"

Marlene allowed her lips to curve up in a slight smile. Oh, he had no idea how talkative Vincent could be when the spotlight wasn't on him. "Now that's my girl." Marlene met Barret's eyes and saw melancholic contentment.

Maybe someday she'd have that. For now, though, canned devastation was the way to go.