It was stupid. Foolish. Idiotic. Obtuse.
Cloud knew he was going to die in the end. Everyone does. But, he thought he'd at least die from internal bleeding; or maybe a fractured skull; asphyxiation; blood-loss; decapitation; evisceration; crucifixion; immolation.
But, apparently, he was going to die from something as trivial and cretinous as tetanus.
"Stop squirming!" Leon snapped irritably.
Cloud refused to look at the other sword-wielder and couldn't help it when his hand twitched again, his fingers brushing against Leon's inner-wrist as the brunette tried to remove something from the blonde's palm.
"I said--" snarled Leon.
Cloud snapped his Mako blue eyes –which had recently been trying to incinerate one of Merlin's large floating clocks merely by staring at it– and gave the other man a look that clearly said 'I know what you said.'
The two men fixed each other with smoldering glares and were silent.
"Still not done?" Yuffie promptly bounded into view, thrusting her head in between the men's glaring-match and staring at Cloud's hand. "Nope!" she squealed, "not done!"
Leon glared at Yuffie while Cloud went back to scowling at an inanimate object.
"No," hissed Leon in a voice that he was trying best to sound calm, "I've been sitting here for an hour, and I still can't get it out."
"I can see it, can't you?" Yuffie chirped, quite immune to the men's aura of total and unadulterated loathing that was floating about them.
"Of course I can see it!" Leon snarled. The brunette quickly sighed and placed a hand over his face, trying desperately to recollect himself.
Yuffie looked between the two men, shrugged her shoulders, and promptly flounced out of the door with a blinding grin on her face.
"You gonna get rid o' tha' splinter any day soon?" Cid grunted from his computer from the other side of the room.
Leon gripped his hair to stop himself screaming the longest, most inconsistent string of vulgar, obscene and distasteful swear-words that he'd been repeating over and over in his head for the last hour.
Cloud huffed at the brunette's attitude and stared at the splinter that was just under his skin, perfectly in the center of his right hand. So what if he'd been overreacting about the tetanus? If that thing wasn't going to come out, it'd get infected anyway.
"Hurry up, would you?" the blonde stated flatly.
Yuffie froze in mid-flounce and whipped around to stare at Merlin's house with large, puppy-like eyes; deafeningly-loud curses exploding from just behind the wooden door of the building. It was not unlike when Sora had spilt coffee on Cid's computer, but, it was not Cid's voice.
"Well, shit. I didn't know Squall knew all that stuff."
((END. I was just sorting through my file that housed all my fics, and I found this one and thought I should post it purely because I can. Absolutely no idea what possessed me to write it, but, hey. At least it's mildly decipherable. Enjoy!))