Final Fantasy - All Series Fan Fiction ❯ The Cliche' Files: Chocobo ❯ Did you know there's a chocobo under your couch? ( Chapter 1 )

The Cliché Files: Chocobo

 

Don't own any FF. It makes me sad. It's all Squeenix.

 

Chapter the first: Did you know there's a chocobo under your couch?

 

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Angeal had long since abandoned sprinting. No, this was a full-out, panicked, I-have-somewhere-to-be-and-I-needed-to-be-there-ten-seconds-ago, world's-gonna-end, mad dash.

 

Help.

 

One simple word, but it made all the difference.

 

Sephiroth had PHSed him a single word message, and that was bad.

 

The only message Angeal could remember being even comparable was back in Wutai. 'Angeal, I have been injured. Unsure of the total extent. Your presence is required. Immediately.' Sephiroth had been sliced open from right shoulder to left hip with a poisoned blade and only a hastily cast Stop had prevented him from bleeding to death. For a man of few words, he sent aggravatingly long PHS messages. Poisoned and bleeding had shortened his communique to fifteen words. For something to warrant a single word...

 

This was bad.

 

Angeal's skidded around a corner, sending two secretaries and their papers flying. He flung a rushed 'Sorry!' over his shoulder, but didn't stop. Grunts and SOLDIERs flattened themselves against the corridor walls, the slower moving ones doomed to be shoved by the sheer force of the First's passage.

 

At the end of the passage he could see Genesis snarling furiously at the elevator, jabbing the call button relentlessly. Angeal skidded to a stop next to him, and they shared worried glance.

 

“Damn it! Hurry up!”

 

“Stairs?” Angeal breathed.

 

The red-head glanced up to check their current floor. Sixty. Sephiroth was on sixty eight. “Stairs,” he agreed, and the pair raced off. The slam of the door to the stairwell neatly covered the ding of the elevator's ill timed arrival.

 

Once upon a time they had run up these stairs for training at four thirty every morning. Their entire squad despised their drill instructor. Back then the steps seemed to go on forever. It was admittedly eerily similar.

 

Finally the pair burst out on the sixty eighth floor, only slightly winded. Without breaking stride, the two took off down the hallway, nearly overshooting their friend's door.

 

“Seph!” Angeal reached to pound on the door, but heightened SOLDIER instincts caused him to jerk back out of the reach of Genesis' fireball. The dark-haired man made a mental note to talk to Gen again about melting open people's doors. Later though. “Seph!” He called again, slamming into the apartment.

 

And froze.

 

“Angeaaaal,” Zack whined, “he won't come out!”

 

Alright, ignore the fact that Zack is lying on his stomach on Seph's carpet. Ignore, also, the fact that there is a large, dirty shoe print (oddly reminiscent of the size and shape of Sephiroth's boots) on the back of Zack's uniform. Prioritize.

 

A quick scan of the room turned up no Sephiroth. The door to the bedroom was shut; the most likely candidate.

 

“Seph, damn, are you alright?” Another flare from Genesis, another door-knob melted into an unusable glob. Blood, Angeal's nose immediately detected. Sephiroth's blood. However, not nearly enough for concern.

 

Sephiroth regarded the pair stonily from his seat on the bed. The expression on his face might, for anyone but his closest friends, be interpreted as indifference. The General was furious.

 

“Oi, Seph,” Genesis called from behind Angeal. “What happened? Cut yourself shaving?” He too had caught sight of the tiny trickle of blood on Sephiroth's right leg.

 

“Get. It. Out.”

 

It takes a real man to admit your friend scares you. It takes a smart man to back out and let Genesis deal with said friend. So Angeal retreated to the living-room. From behind him he could pick up traces of the entirely too interesting conversation.

 

“Seph? Are those teeth marks?”

 

“Get it out, before I kill it.”

 

“What did you do pup?” Angeal groaned.

 

“ME? Angeaaaal, why ya gotta blame me all the time?” Zack unleashed his major talent: the puppy eyes of the eternally fragile and potentially offendable.

 

“Because I'm usually right.”

 

“I didn't do anything! He was already here when I heard Seph yelling!”

 

Seph did not yell. Zack probably heard a rather loud breath of air or something. That, however, was not the important part.

 

“He?” There was someone else in Seph's room?

 

“Yeeeees, he. I told you didn't I? He won't come out.” Zack gestured to the couch.

 

Oh.

 

OH!

 

Curious, Angeal dropped to a crouch, mako-enhanced eyes peering into the gloom of Under-Couch.

 

“Seph?” Angeal called, staring into bright blue eyes topped by yellow fluff. “Did you know there's a chocobo under your couch?”