Surprise

The date was August 23 and for once there wasn't a Cloud in sight. The weather was perfect. The grass was green. And there was a furry, blond tail swishing impatiently in the massive bushes outside of a small, gray-blue house in the suburbs of Dissidia.

After a moment the bushes rustled and a hissed complaint was hear before the tail vanished from sight.

Nestled amidst the bushes were none other than high school sophomore's Zidane Tribal and Bartz Klauser, two of the biggest troublemakers to have ever graced the neighborhood. Granted, most of the trouble caused wasn't of their own volition, but they were blamed nevertheless.

Bartz narrowed his brown eyes at his friend and crossed his arms over his rumpled blue shirt. "You're going to get us caught."

Zidane sheepishly scratched the back of his neck. "Hey, I said I was sorry. It's got a mind of its own!"

"I know you can control it, so do something!"

For a brief moment, Zidane's lackadaisical smile slipped. Then he loudly thwacked his tail through the bushes, breaking down a few branches and showering leaves upon them. He broke out into laughter at the disgruntled look on the brunet's face.

"Relax, man. Our plan is foolproof! He'll never expect us to be hiding in his bushes," Zidane said confidently.

"He's gonna know something's up if he sees your tail." Bartz looked pointedly at the twitching appendage, daring Zidane to disagree.

Zidane gave in and let his tail curl around a branch so he wouldn't forget and give away their position. "There. Now he can't see my tail. Now can we talk about our plan to surprise him?"

"You realize it's not going to surprise anyone if they can hear you talking from the sidewalk, right?"

The two jumped guiltily and peered up through the leaves to see an amused Firion and a laughing Tidus looking back at them. The two boys were still in their school uniforms, apparently having just left from after-school activities.

"Quick! Get in the bushes!" Zidane ordered, reaching up and grabbing Firion's tie, pulling him down into the bushes.

The silver-haired boy gave a yelp as he fell and then landed with an audible thud, practically on top of Bartz.

"Zidane!"

"Sorry!"

Tidus laughed some more and opted to crawl in to join them, rather have his monkey-tailed neighbor pull him down. After settling down in the dirt, he reached past Bartz and Zidane to remove a twig from Firion's hair, an act that left his friend blushing faintly.

Zidane grinned, noticing the sudden color to his cheeks. "So, Fi-"

"Why are you guys in the bushes?" Firion quickly interrupted, not wanting to venture down the road Zidane was so clearly trying to bring up again.

Clueless as ever as to what was going on, Bartz beamed and punched a fist in the air. "We're gonna ambush Squall!"

For a moment, there was silence. The Firion abruptly moved to grab Tidus's hand and whisk him away from that place before Squall found out what was going on and killed all of them for trespassing in his shrubberies.

"NO!"

The troublemakers lunged forward and latched onto them before they could escape.

"You can't leave! We need your help!" Bartz said, deciding to launch straight into an explanation. "See, every year me 'n Zidane try to surprise Squall with a party but he always finds out somehow. So this year we figured we'd surprise him without a party!"

"Are we genius's or what?" Zidane bragged.

Firion looked worried.

Tidus, on the other hand, looked nothing short of excited.

"I love parties! Especially surprise ones! Well, except for the ones my dad throws. That jerk…" He continued grumbling about his father for a few minutes while the others went on with their conversation.

"But why are you trying to surprise him?" Firion asked, trying to coax some sense out of the two. The last thing he wanted was to make Squall angry. He was rather fond of the conversations he had with the other teen and was in no mood to cause them to end. "You know he hates things like this."

"But it's his birthday today," explained Zidane as if the simple statement answered everything. Which, in a way, it did.

Bartz flicked a leaf from his shoes. "And ever since we found out, we made it our personal duty to surprise him every year on this day!"

"And it's worked! Just, eh…" Zidane scratched the back of his neck. "Not quite in the way we wanted it to. Like-hey! Remember when we caught the oven on fire baking him a cake?"

Bartz nodded enthusiastically. "Yeah! And the smoke alarm went off and we all ran outside!"

"And there we were, standing in the road at three in the morning while Squall and the others tried to put it out!"

Firion held up a hand, his brows furrowed in confusion. "Wait. Why were you baking a cake at three in the morning?"

Zidane shrugged. "We were bored."

Firion began asking another question, but thought better of it and started thinking of a way out of the bushes.

"Last year wasn't very fun though," mused Bartz.

"Yeah." The cheerful quality dropped out of Zidane's voice, surprising the others. "Squall was really pissed at us."

"What happened?" Tidus asked, having finished muttering insulting things about his father.

Bartz and Zidane exchanged glances, each daring the other to explain. After a few seconds of the nonverbal debate, Bartz gave in.

"We broke his window."

Firion's jaw dropped, his mind immediately trying to come with a reason as to why they were still alive after such a thing.

Suddenly, the bushes rustled and Bartz squeaked in surprise and scooted back. However, instead of coming face-to-face with an angry brunet wielding a baseball bat, it was a pretty blonde girl wearing a uniform from their school. She covered his mouth in her surprise, her light purple eyes going wide.

"I'm sorry!" She apologized. "I heard someone talking in here and wanted to see what was going on. I'm not intruding, am I?"

"Not at all!" Zidane immediately replied. "You can come sit by me, Terra!"

Despite knowing the flirtatious nature of her neighbor, Terra considered it for a moment when her eyes fell on his swaying tail. She worried her lower lip when he patted the ground and gave her his best "look", the one that had all of the girls swooning.

"I-I don't know…"

"Somehow this all seems like a really, really bad idea…" Firion mumbled.

"Or you could sit by me!" Tidus volunteered, flashing a charming smile.

Torn between the two blonds, Terra's internal debate began anew. "I should really be going… I promised Luneth I'd help him with our science project today…"

"Onion kid can wait. We're planning a surprise party for Squall!" Tidus exclaimed.

Terra's eyes lit up. "I love parties!" Without another second of consideration, she carefully squeezed in between Bartz and Tidus to happily await information on what had been planned so far.

"But we're not planning a party," Bartz protested.

"Yeah! It's a surprise without the party!" Zidane filled in, feeling a little sore that he wasn't the one sitting beside a pretty girl. Instead, he had to sit beside Firion. "That's why we're in the bushes instead of in his house."

Firion resisted the urge to comment that the only reason they weren't in the house was because they ended up destroying something whenever they were there.

Terra looked a little disappointed. "Can't we have a party after the surprise?"

"But then he'll sense it! See, Squall can sense when we want to throw him a party and he runs away and hides from us!" Bartz explained. He then laughed and jokingly said: "After last year I'm surprised he hasn't moved away and refused to give us his new address!"

Terra looked at him curiously. "Last year? Oh! That was when you two paintballed his house, right?"

Bartz shook his head. "Nah, last year we broke his window throwing rocks at it. Tiny rocks! It was the year before the year before that when we paintballed his house. Though I'm gonna go with that incident being Seifer's fault. He started that one." He grinned fondly. "It sure was fun though. I still wanna try doing that with snowballs."

"Hey, do you guys hear something weird?" Tidus asked.

The others fell silent, listing for a noise outside of the norm. The sound of a puttering motor soon rose above the usual chirping of birds and the shouts of the kids down the street.

"Sounds like a four-wheeler or a go cart or-"

"Moped!" Bartz shouted excitedly. "That means Cloud's home! Everyone quiet!"

All five teenagers hunkered down in the bushes, making sure to remain out of sight. If they were caught by Cloud it would be all over. He would tell his housemate for sure.

The motor grew louder as it pulled into the driveway and rolled past them. After a few seconds it quieted down and they could hear Cloud cursing the vehicle. Then a door slammed shut and all was quiet once more.

"So…" Tidus brushes a couple leaves from his hair. "When does Squall come home?"

Zidane and Bartz paused to think about it for a moment, trying to recall what Squall's new work schedule was. It seemed to change weekly.

Firion looked at them in exasperation. "You're hiding in the bushes and you don't know when he comes home? What if he already is home?"

Bartz waved off the question. "We would know if he was. There would be signs!"

Terra hummed and glanced at the house. "But you know… his car broke down last week and it was only yesterday that he got it to the garage."

"What!"

With the amount of noise the two made as they tried to convince the others, as well as themselves, that they would know if Squall was home, they never heard the front door slam shut for a second time. Nor did they hear the approach of two pairs of heavy boots on the concrete.

"Besides, the lack of a car wouldn't stop him from going to work. He'd just hitch a ride from Cloud or w-"

"Umm, guys?" Tidus interrupted, sounding worried.

"-or walk," Zidane continued. "Or, you know, he has a bike somewhere. Though I haven't seen him ride it since elementary school… Come to think of it, wasn't it Ello-OWW!" He jumped straight out of the bushes and clutched his tail protectively, tears in his eyes. He turned around, really to yell at whoever dared to pull his tail. "Who-!"

"Zidane." One dark brow raised above steel blue eyes framed by brown hair. A scar stood out against pale skin. The leather-clad teen pushed aside a few branches to regard the others hiding out in the shrubberies. "Bartz. Terra. Firion. Tidus." He nodded to each of them as he said their names.

Cloud stood back, looking amused by the situation.

Squall cleared his throat and looked back to Zidane. "Why are you in our bushes?"

"Eh heh… umm… surprise?"

The end

Well, my friend Siriusderomanus wrote a Dissidia one-shot, so I decided I couldn't be left behind and had to write one too. It didn't turn out quite the way I wanted it too, but I still like it.

To answer any questions about the living arrangements of Squall's house:

Light is the oldest and is technically the owner of the house (and also unmentioned in this one-shot). Cloud is the second oldest, a Senior in high school. Seifer Almasy (from FF8, in case you didn't know) is the third oldest, also a high school senior. Squall's the youngest and is a junior in high school. They all share the mentioned car, but Cloud has the moped all to himself.