Ch. 1: In which Leon is very cold

"Strife!"

"…hm?" Cloud turned to see Leon behind him in the hallway.

"Give me your sweatshirt."

"What?"

"Give me your sweatshirt," Leon repeated.

"…Why?" Cloud asked.

"Because I'm COLD!" Leon burst out, shivering and rubbing his arms to illustrate this fact.

"Where's your jacket?" Cloud asked observantly. Leon ALWAYS wore his jacket, but there he was in just a plain white t-shirt. Cloud had thought it just a sort of accessory that Leon couldn't do without for the sake of his self-image, but apparently it kept him warm despite it having short sleeves. Cloud wasn't entirely sure which was more pathetic- Leon wearing accessories for his ego or having a sensitivity to the weather akin to an old lady.

"Some bastard STOLE it," Leon moaned, "out of my gym locker, which I'm pretty sure I locked…"

"Don't you have a spare or something? You wear the thing every day. It can't possibly be the same one," Cloud teased. The sarcasm was obviously lost on Leon in the midst of his crisis, however, as he replied,

"I USED to, I lost the other one last summer at the beach… stupid starfish…" Leon trailed off muttering to himself, evidently very upset.

Cloud blinked and stifled a snicker. Was he joking?

"Anyway, just give me your sweatshirt," Leon continued, having regained his focus. "I'm freezing."

"Fine, fine…" Cloud took off his black Travers High track hoodie and handed it to Leon, who grabbed it immediately and pulled it over his head.

"Ah…" he said with a final shiver. "Wow, these things are warm," he said in surprise. Cloud wondered if Leon had ever tried wearing anything other than his jacket to keep warm. Then he wondered if he would ever get his hoodie back. Then he shrugged and turned around with a smirk that Leon couldn't see (and wouldn't have anyway because he was too immersed in the coziness of Cloud's sweatshirt) and headed to an undisclosed location to skip school for the next period.

Leon, on the other hand, was in such a good mood due to the fuzzy texture against his skin that he actually decided to go to class.

He heard a giggle as he took his seat in math class, which wasn't really strange at all considering Yuffie sat behind him.

"Why is Leon wearing Cloud's sweater?" she "whispered" to the girl next to her (she wasn't very good at whispering, except stage whispers, which was perhaps just as well since she tended to have lead roles in most of the theatre productions, but was also somewhat unfortunate in the gossip community).

Leon stiffened slightly as he realized the implications that would be going through Yuffie's head right about now, and mentally slapped himself for not realizing that he was wearing a track sweatshirt that very obviously had "STRIFE" printed across the back in big, white, contrasting letters.

"Do you think they're dating or something?" Yuffie asked her friend, barely concealing a squeal. Most of the girls at Travers High School had some kind of obsession over Cloud or Leon, but Yuffie was the only one (to Leon's knowledge) that wanted the two of them to get together.

Leon briefly considered taking off the sweater, but his hate of the cold quickly won over his embarrassment. The math room was always the coldest, anyway. Instead, he pulled up the hood, in an attempt to hide his face. He immediately regretted this a moment later however, when the bell rang, and the teacher walked up the front of the room to take attendance and said, "Leonhart, please remove your hood, no hats or hoods in school." Naturally, the whole class turned to look at Leon, who didn't normally have a hood at all, and noticed the out-of-place-on-several-levels sweatshirt.

The classroom broke out into various mutterings of "Wait, why is Strife in our class?", "Why is Leon wearing Cloud's sweatshirt?", "Since when does Leon do track?", "Are they dating?", "Ooh, I wonder if they've kissed yet," (Yuffie), "Where's my eraser?", "Didn't know Leon was that side of the fence,", and "I think it's under your foot."

"I. was. COLD!" Leon all but shouted, and stormed out of the room. The whole class blinked simultaneously. Aerith, the TA, simply shrugged knowingly and started writing an equation on the board that involved seven dwarves and the affect of whistling on their rates of work.

A black object suddenly appeared in front of Cloud's nose, and he looked up to see his hoodie dangling from a slightly trembling hand.

"Leonhart?"

"…You can have your sweatshirt back," Leon mumbled, his hair obscuring his red face.

"Won't you be cold?" asked Cloud sincerely.

"…I think I can deal with i," Leon said grudgingly.

"If you say so," Cloud shrugged with a smirk.

Leon walked away shivering until he got outside and put the heated seats on in his red sports car.

"I knew it would be good for him to go without his jacket for a day," Cloud mused to himself as he wedged his English binder into his locker with some effort. Leon's jacket took up a surprising amount of space.