CHAPTER NINE: DAY THIRTEEN
--Campfire--:It's like camp without the mosquitoes.
A/N: I think I literally dreamed this scenario first. Cutting out the odd details that happen in every dream, you get this. It's rather cute—at least I think so. Anyway, here y'are. My favorite chapter of them all. When I was making an outline of all the chapters I was going to write in my little notebook, I couldn't wait to write this one. It's more like a drabble than anything, really. Thank you readers! You make my life. I love you. )

When he went to bed on the couch that night, Tseng was getting goose bumps up and down his arms, and was strangely shivering. That didn't happen very often, so he decided to be brilliant and start the fireplace. Earlier that day he had thought he heard the heating system making odd noises, but he wanted to be manly and that meant not complaining about the cold. So he sucked it up and lit the fire instead. It took awhile, but finally he had a beautiful crackling fire. Tseng grinned, patted himself on the back, and fell asleep.


"'Ey! 'Ey, Tseng! Scootch it over, yo!" Tseng was woken up from his dream of killing Kadaj in the middle of the night by two cold feet being thrust underneath his blanket. Jerking upright, he thought he saw a flash of red hair glinting in the fire. Yes, it was definitely Reno, with a huge quilt thrown over his shoulders.

"Wha?" Was all Tseng managed to slur as Reno patted the couch pillows and settled down, looking like an Eskimo with the huge quilt bundled over his head. Reno was shivering too.

"'Wha' is right, yo. It's freezing up there." And it must have been freezing, for Reno's teeth were chattering. Tseng could hear it. Tseng got up and put two more logs in the fire. The clock read 2:32 A.M. He fell back asleep, which wasn't easy, because Reno snored.


"Move your ass over, Reno!" Tseng was just about to stab Yazoo in the face when Yazoo melted into Elena, who was messing up his blanket order as she crawled under it. Reno yawned and grumbled about her disturbing his sleep, and she smacked him as two more cold feet were placed near Tseng's arm.

"It is like the Arctic zone upstairs," Elena shuddered against Tseng, making his body shake, too. He got up to put more logs into the fire and checked the clock. It read 3:01 A.M. Reno had started to snore again, and when Tseng finally got settled again, Elena's head dropped on his shoulder.


"Elena, you are skinny and can shove over more than that." Once again, Tseng was one step away from killing Loz in with deadly pickles when Rude's baldhead glinted in the fire and woke him up. "It's cold," Rude explained. Reno cursed at them all, calling Rude a 'fucking grandma' or something like it before his head lolled again. This time, Elena received Rude's cold feet treatment. Tseng, who had a stack of logs within easy reach this time, pelted two into the fire. The clock read 3:17 A.M. Rude and Reno started snoring unison.


"OOF! Mother F…Marlene!" Reno let out a strangled yell. Tseng was getting rather cranky this time.

"Okay, I was this close to killing Sephiroth, and… hello, Tifa-san." Tseng trailed off as Tifa, wrapped in another huge blanket, having just deposited a quivering Marlene into Reno's arms, shooed them all off the couch temporarily to pull it out into a bed.

"It's like sleeping on ice up there," She commented, and Tseng sighed resignedly and was just about to drop more logs into the bright fire when Tifa stopped him. "Already did it," She said with a smile. The clock read 3:45 or something like it, because Tseng's eyes blurred when he tried to read it.


"There you are, Marlene." Denzel's teeth were clanging together loud enough to wake the dead, and Tseng, who hadn't even bothered to dream anything this time, crossed his arms as the little boy piled in with a pillow and blanket of his own. Tseng was getting rather hot, and was only too glad to get up to pile fresh wood into the still-going fire. He turned back and saw Elena stretched out in his corner. At least, he thought it was Elena. He checked. Nope. It was Cloud.

Shoving him aside to make a little space for himself, Tseng took a long while to finally get comfortable again. His legs kept on colliding with somebody else, who kept kicking him. The clock read 4:32 A.M.


"Tseng-san. Tseng-san, wake up." It was all Tseng could do to keep from hurling continuous insults at them all when a mug of hot chocolate was placed under his nose. He glanced drowsily around. Everyone except for Marlene was awake, and they were all sipping from their own individual mug. "Nobody could really sleep," Tifa said in a low voice. "It was too cold. The heat must have given out last night."

"I was sleeping," Tseng muttered, but luckily, one of the logs popped and broke noisily, covering his incessant mumblings. The clock probably read something before 6:30, because Tseng didn't check it, but the sun wasn't up yet, so he was pretty sure that his prediction was accurate.


In the morning, as the early rays of welcomed sunshine seeped into the bar, nobody was awake in Seventh Heaven to appreciate it. Reno and Rude were snoring again, Elena was submersed totally under all the layers of blankets, Denzel and Marlene had fallen asleep fighting over a pillow, and sleeping Cloud's arm was protectively around a sleeping Tifa. And Tseng? He'd passed out over his mug of hot chocolate, which was still steadily dripping from the ends of his fingers onto the floor. One of his hands was gripped on a log.

The fire had finally turned to mere embers, and it gave a last red twinkle before dying.