Notes: Found this in my Google docs, completely unfinished, but it was clearly meant to be a crack-taken-seriously type fic posted on Halloween. I'm fervently for Cloud/Tifa, canonically, but I'm also pretty sure this was meant to be a Cloud/Tifa/Reno love triangle with no resolution because it wasn't a ship-driven fic. I don't know. I can't even remember the intended plot, but posting this (and any of my other findings) in case I want to revisit it one day. :)
Reno has stopped by Seventh Heaven frequently enough after-hours that he stops expecting anything more than a run-of-the-mill evening experience – specifically, the way Lockhart always eyes his entrance with resignation, half-heartedly telling him to get lost while still reaching for a mid-shelf whiskey bottle and pouring a glass meant for him because she already knows he won’t listen.
But at the sight of Lockhart tied up to a chair in the middle of the room, surrounded by her thorns-in-his-side friends, he is simultaneously confused, intrigued, and turned on.
Right until SOLDIER boy glares at him from one end of his outrageously oversized sword.
Standing beside the barmaid, Barret grunts, “We’re closed, Turk.”
Reno coolly raises his hands in a peace offering. Shrugs.
The hyperactive ninja sitting on the bar perks up and says, “Coming right up!” at the same time her colleagues yell at her.
“Enough,” Tifa finally says with a roll of her eyes. “We have a bigger problem.”
Reno delicately pushes away the sword aimed at his face with an insincere, but mollifying grin. “I’ll say. What’s with you, Lockhart?”
He notes the way she glares briefly at her cohorts. Interesting.
“I’m in a bind," she says with a poorly attempted indication of her strapped shoulders, as if to pointedly add, Obviously.
“Huh, no kidding. Slipped into it, did ya?”