Part 7 : The Trouble With Chocobos

"...Save the world again?"

"WARK!"

"You think so too?" said Yuffie. She was talking to the chocobo. At least SOMEONE understood that Tifa was completely to blame for the situation in which she, Yuffie, was heading through the mountains on a moulting and apparently insane chocobo - aiming for what she never thought she'd ever ever have to aim for - to find Barret.

Yuffie was sure it couldn't be anything serious and she probably shouldn't take it seriously, but nothing Barret had ever said to her had been free of some sort of insult. True, the same could be probably said about everything she'd ever said to him, but... still...

It didn't mean she deserved to go find the man and somehow persuade him to follow her all the way back to Rocket Town.

"WARK!" said the chocobo.

"Yeah," said Yuffie. "Not fair, is it?"

"WARK WARK!"

"Uh huh."

"WARK WARK WARK!"

"OK, now you're getting annoying."

"WARKWARKWARKWARK!" it said angrily and started running in circles. Yuffie flung her hands around its neck for dear life and kicked it to see if that would make it stop.

It didn't.

The chocobo WARKed some more and sprinted off in the direction they had just come.

"STOP!" yelled Yuffie, having difficulty holding on.

Helpfully, the chocobo did not stop, in fact it speeded up and started running towards the nearest rockface.

"STOP NOW!" Yuffie stared at the rapidly approaching mountain and tucked her head down against the chocobo's neck in a sort of last-chance-brace-position.

At the last moment, the chocobo changed direction and Yuffie was thrown back to her original seating position, with a couple yellow feathers up her nose.

"Why don't they make these things with reins?" she muttered as they careered forward again in some other apparently totally random direction. "Some people have no consideration for-aaaaaAAAAA!"

She landed painfully on her side and rolled quickly away to avoid being trampled. "Gotcha!" On second thoughts, it probably hadn't been such a bright idea to grab the chocobo by its foot, but she'd done it now and it was a bit late for second thoughts. "Stay - still -"

To her huge surprise, the chocobo obliged and stood stock still. Yuffie pulled herself to her feet. She squared up to the yellow feathery face and put her hands firmly on its shoulders.

"OK," she instructed it, calmer than was probably reasonable. "We're going to try this again. And you're going to behave, OK?"

"Wark..."

"...I'll take that as a yes."

"WARK!"

"Er, right. Maybe if I talk chocobo you'll understand me, wark?"

"WARKWARKWARK!"

"What the-"

Something behind her made a low ominous sound that didn't sound the least bit like "wark".

She turned around.

"OH MY - RUN!"

She leapt onto the chocobo again. It still didn't move.

"RUN!" she screamed again, throwing her weight forward. "RUN! - I mean - WARK!"

The huge Thing slashed a huge claw through the air. Then the chocobo ran.

"Keep-running-don't-look-back, keep-running-don't-look-back," Yuffie chanted to herself as the chocobo sped forward, warking furiously.


"Junon, right?" asked Tifa for the zillionth time.

"Where else?" Cid raised his eyes to the heavens.

"...Cloud?" TALK to me, damnit!

"What."

Tifa looked over at him. Now they had a serious mission and all, he'd snapped shut again. Well, to be fair; up until then, it had seemed a bit too good to be true. It... wasn't anything she couldn't cope with. Nothing she hadn't seen before.

"You OK?"

"Yes..."

She did what she could. Talked to him; you had to just keep hoping he'd get the hint and say something back, but it was a long shot.

"Are we all set?" asked Shera, sticking her head into the Highwind's - for want of a better word - cockpit.

It was not the usual crew. Cid was happily installed in the main pilot's seat, with Tifa rather less happily next to him as emergency co-pilot. She had no idea how to fly. Cloud and Vincent were to manage navigation... and Shera, of course, was engineering, tea making, and any other job anyone else had forgotten.

"All aboard?" Tifa attempted a grin. She had been realising just how uneasily quiet it had all gone since Yuffie had left.

There was a messy chorus of 'Yeah,'s, 'aye-aye's and 'what d'you ing think?'s.

And then the Highwind, at long last, took to the skies.


Yuffie was feeling slightly better, now that there was no longer a twenty foot spike-clawed generally-evil-looking monster chasing her.

She and the chocobo had also reached a sort of agreement: it would go the way she told it, and she would NOT on any account attempt to speak chocobo to it. It seemed to unnerve, or possibly just terrify, the yellow birdie.

The chocobo eating half Yuffie's lunch had not been part of the bargain, but she hadn't been able to do much about that.

Consequently, she was very hungry when she reached the town of North Corel, and as a consequence of that her initial instinct was to head straight for the new café (part of the government's fairly sucessful redevelopment plan for the place). That café was calling to her. No! she told herself, I have more important things to do! The café was still calling to her. A waitress or someone inside walked up to the window presented new temptation in the form of a sign that said of "Double chocolate milkshake, buy one get one free! Today only!".

"Unnggghhh..." said Yuffie, her feet starting to walk in that direction of their own accord.

Then -

"Excuse me, is this your chocobo?"

"Ohmigod yes!" Yuffie spun round to face the small-ish girl who was attempting to keep hold of the fiercely struggling chocobo she'd accidently let go of in her chocolate-milkshake-fascination. "Sorry!"

"It's alright, I like chocobos."

This seemed hard to believe. Well, on second thoughts, it wasn't TOO unbelievable - one just had to assume that the feeling was not at all mutual by the way that the chocobo seemed to be trying to peck the girl's eyes out.

Yuffie carefully grabbed hold around its neck again. "Behave!"

The girl giggled and started to leave, but Yuffie called after her, remembering something. Oh yes, the reason she'd come here...

"Hey wait! I'm looking for someone here. D'you know him? Big fellow, swears a lot, kinda annoying to spend more than ten minutes with? Name's Barret Wallace?"

"Oh yeah! He's my dad!" The girl bounced up and down excitably.

Whooops.

"Er... sorry. Ummm... do you know where he is now? Only I kinda really need to talk to him."

"Yeah, he'll be at my house! Come on!" She bounced off.

"Er, OK," said Yuffie, feeling for once in her life completely out-bounced by someone.


"The hell you doin' here!"

The house was quite large. The furniture was simple but nice, and the room was tidy. One wall was covered in a child's drawings and some blurry photographs.

Barret himself, however - somehow managing even to sit aggressively in a an extremely incongruous pink armchair - had not changed a bit.

"Hey Barret!" Yuffie grinned incredibly widely and bounced up to him, just to prove that she still could.

"Nuh-uh, don' come any closer!"

Yuffie mentally debated giving him a huge hug just to check the reaction, but decided that was going waaay too near his gun-arm. She settled for: "Great to see you! ...Didya miss me?"

"No."

She pouted. "I'm hurt," she said petulantly.

"Crazy kid," he muttered.

"Ya think?"

There was a short pause. Then - "Oh what the £. C'mere, Yuffster."

Yuffie had had many surprising, strange, and surreal experiences over her seventeen and a quarter years. Not one of them could measure up to the absolutely unprecedented one of Barret Wallace embracing her in a heartfelt, bone-crushing embrace.

"Missed you, kid."

"Missed you," said Yuffie, surprising herself. But - hey, so what? she thought and shrugged, with difficultly.

Barret let go. "Gut reaction," he said gruffly. "Won't happen again."

"Agreed," she said fervently.

"That's damn friendly," Barret observed, sitting down again.

Yuffie nodded sagely. "Yeah, like all those times you called me a stupid brat."

"I had a £(ing good reason!"

"Whatever. Hey, you gonna let me sit down or what?"

He rolled his eyes. "Make yerself comfortable. Mind if I ask again what the hell you're actually doing here?"

Yuffie plopped down on a sofa. "Oooh!" she squealed bouncing up and down on it. "Cool sofa!"

Barret glared and cocked his gun-arm.

"Geez! Yeah, OK." She made the proposal. "So like, you wanna come back and join up with Cloud an' Tif an' Vincent an' Cid an' Cait an' Red an' me an' save the world again?"

Barret stared. "This some kind of a joke?"

"Nuh-uh! Seriously, some weirdo monster attacked Cid, and Vincent got paranoid and said it was Jenova and Cloud and Tifa are at Cid's house too - or they were, now they've all gone off to get Red and Reeve - and they're being SOOOO annoying acting all lovestruck half the time and not speaking the rest of it and Cid's still a moody idiot and swears worse than you, but ohmigods - SHERA was so cool a coupla days back and-"

Barret buried his face in his good hand. "STOP!"

She did so, shrugging. "See? Anyway, you wanna come?"

Barret looked helplessly around him. "I - damn, I dunno!"

"Pweeeeeeeeeeeee-"

"Alright, alright! Just SHUDDUP!"

"-ease!" Works every time, she noted.

"But what am I gonna do with Marlene?"

"Ohh, was she that girl?"

"Whaddya think?"

"Hey, I dunno, I never saw her before! Well... she could come too!"

"She's six years old, idiot."

Yuffie rolled her eyes. "I didn't mean she'd actually fight the evil monster..."

There was a cheerful voice from the doorway. "Hey, what evil monster? Can I PLEASE come? I'll kill it!" And Marlene jumped in, swinging a stick around like a sword and occasionally turning it into a gun and making bangbang noises.

Yuffie giggled. Barret glared at her.

Yuffie then tried being reasonable. "There's lots of other kids in Rocket Town now, you know. And, hey, there's probably a day-care centre or something now to go with the museum..."

"What museum? The hell you talking about?"

"Daddy!" Marlene piped, widening her eyes and staring up at him in calculated shock. Yuffie decided she liked this girl.

"Uh... sorry. But what museum?"

"Long story," said Yuffie, grinning, "but basically what happened is Cid - you know, with the rocket and the tea obsession and worse mouth than you - and Shera - you remember her? She's always kinda -"

"Alright!" Barret covered his ears. "OK, it can wait, let's go already!"

"You coming then?" Whooohooo!"

"WHOOOHOOOO!" yelled Marlene, not to be outdone by someone ten years older than her, and causing Barret to visibly wince at the pitch and volume... "WE'RE GONNA GO AND GET A MONSTER!"

Yuffie liked this girl a lot.

"Er... something like that, sweetie," said Barret as he went upstairs to pack.