fic: room to grow (final fantasy vii)

Title: Room to Grow
Fandoms: Final Fantasy VII
Characters: Tifa Lockhart, Barret Wallace
Pairing: Tifa Lockhart/Barret Wallace
Rating: Gen
AO3 Tags: Hobbies, Pre-Canon, Pre-Relationship, Awkward Flirting, OG and Remake Compliant
Summary: Tifa and Barret bond over an unexpected connection.

Notes: Written for Barret x Tifa Week on Tumblr! With the prompt: Hobbies.

Tifa didn’t know what to do. Three weeks into her plant experiment, she brought the struggling plant in its cracked cup to Seventh Heaven. Maybe it just needed light at a different time of day. Or maybe one of her patrons might have an unexpected green thumb, though she doubted it.

She forgot about the plant at the end of the counter until Barret arrived halfway through the evening. The big man with a gun for an arm and a hidden heart of gold intimidated most, but Tifa saw him for who he was beneath. The sight of him always had her breath catching in her throat. She looked forward to the nights when he’d stop by to see her. “What’re you got there?” he asked, pointing at the plant.

“Oh, that.” Tifa sighed, wiping her hands on a bar towel. Now some of the leaves were turning yellow and falling off the tiny branches. “I tried to grow a plant. It’s not going very well.”

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