Sense Trumps Logic
By Rhino7
Disclaimer: I don't own Kingdom Hearts, its characters or storyline. This one-shot is mine, as is Duke. This is the last ditty before I start actively working on the second installment of the Mercy Trilogy, the sequel to Ask Mercy Not of Me. This one-shot falls just before the timeline of the second installment, which will be titled Lay Down the Salt Lines. Constructive criticism is welcome and appreciated!
..:--X--:..
The low, snarling groan that broke the two hour silence nearly made Leon jump in surprise. The groan was only preemptive as Tifa stopped writing, sat up, and glared hatefully at the papers in front of her. He barely lifted his eyes, finishing his signature at the bottom of his latest report. The stacks of files between them could be measured in inches, so he couldn't see what had provoked such a glare, but he could guess.
"This is stupid."
That statement had become Tifa's litany for the past week, as more and more paperwork was delegated to the Council members of the Alliance. The small mountain of files and reports was splashed across the board room table. He could almost hear the dotted lines snickering at him.
Tifa looked over-caffeinated, eyes bloodshot, and frown carved into her face, but the indignant tone in her voice nearly earned a smirk from Leon, but not quite. Mimicking her, he set his pen down and sat back, rubbing his eyes. Seeing this sign of surrender, Tifa sihged.
"It's 9 o'clock." She checked the clock on the wall. "We've been at this for 13 hours."
"Oh, don't tell me that." Leon grumbled, shaking a cramp out of his writing hand.
"There's barely a dent." She gestured to the mass equivalent of an oak tree of paper between them. "This is stupid."
Leon grunted at that and stood, almost surprised that his body remembered how to move after sitting down for so long.
Financial and economic progress reports were coming up on the deadline. Allocation for Radiant Garden reconstruction, fund applications to the Council for discussion of Allied economy, reports detailing military presence in worlds with lingering Heartless and spawning civil unrest and tension, and of course public relations statements. Those who had been in charge of these things had been so swamped with municipal and private issues secluded to Radiant Garden that they couldn't handle inter-worldly analysis and investigation on top of it. Thus, it had all been dumped on Tifa, who had grabbed Leon by the neck and dragged him down with her…because neither of them were busy enough, apparently.
Whoever came up with the idea of reporting everything on paper should be shot. And Leon had a gun he hadn't shot since the war ended two years ago.
Tifa stood and stretched, turning her back on the table of papers.
"Whoever invented paper work should be beaten."
Leon smirked at that and poured another cup of coffee, looking to Tifa, who shook her head.
"If we don't drown in these files, I'm never drinking coffee again."
After the load of work had become nearly impossible for both of their efforts combined, Leon and Tifa had decided to finally just sit down and work non-stop until the reports were caught up and up to date. So, at eight o'clock that morning, they had locked themselves away in the windowless boardroom on the seventh floor of the Allied Headquarter building in Radiant Garden. Just Leon, Tifa, five gallons of coffee and a truck load of paperwork.
Now, 13 hours later, they were still here. They had only taken brief breaks to pry their hands out of the pen-holding position and stare at something other than ink words on white paper. Oh, and it got better. After discovering the crippling power of disorganized files in Ansem the Wise's office, the Council had voted to have all reporting and statements submitted and stored electronically. This was the last period of doing it all pen-to-paper. Leon wasn't sure if this fact made the work relieving or even more possible.
"When are you going home?" He asked blandly.
They had both been quiet for the last two hours of work. While he preferred quiet, after a while, his ears started ringing with allocation figures and stock rates. Tifa must have felt similar, because she latched onto the throwaway conversation.
"I'm not. I'm just going to stay here tonight." She replied.
"An all-nighter." He lifted an eyebrow at her.
She shrugged. "It's already night outside and if I go home now, I'll never come back." Another glare at the table.
Leon sighed heavily. "Same here."
All of the reports had deadlines before the elections for the Council of representatives in a few weeks. Filing for that would be a totally different monster. He inwardly cringed at the idea. A few people had pointed out that he should run for Radiant Garden representative. He refused. He had enough on his plate without adding political crap. As much as he didn't see eye-to-eye with Graham Nestor, the current Radiant Garden representative, he had to concede that Nestor wasn't an imbecile when it came to politics. Leon wouldn't have been able to stand it. To him, the Council just sat around arguing about who had a fancier suit and who the public was siding with. To Hell with that shit.
Tifa stretched and pulled out her phone. "I'm ordering pizza."
Leon watched her dial the number and listened to her order, zoning out slightly as Tifa sweet-talked a free order of breadsticks and threatened a free bottle of soda out of the poor bastard at the pizza place.
"Twenty minutes." She announced after hanging up. "So I'm going for a 20 minute walk to get the smell of paper and ink off me."
"Good. I'm getting tired of looking at you." Leon mumbled, sitting reluctantly back down.
"Oh, I hope you get a paper cut." She huffed, leaving the quarantine of the boardroom.
Silence resumed in the room as the door swung closed after her and he tilted his head back in the chair, staring blankly at the ceiling.
Recent polls declared that public opinion of the Alliance was very low. Like he needed a stupid poll to derive that. No one in Radiant Garden was happy with the Alliance's handling of post-war issues. Though they had won the war against the Heartless and Organization XIII, war debt had the Alliance buried up to her ears. Weapons, mobilization, military salary and machine maintenance, as well as a thousand other things were overwhelming the Council's severely understaffed Headquarters.
Leon could barely remember what his own apartment looked like. For the last two months, he had been forced to bunk in Merlin's house, the staff quarters, break room, and even his office between shifts and town patrol, nearly five out of seven nights a week. Money was tight and it was infuriating to pay rent on an apartment which served more primarily as a storage area. Tifa's apartment was closer to Headquarters and since their projects coincided so often, for a while they would work there instead of the office, just to get out of the office. Neither of them were office type people. They fact that he hadn't been outside in 13 hours almost made his skin crawl.
The boardroom door closed and he jerked slightly, opening his eyes, which he hadn't realized had drifted closed, and saw Tifa carrying in a pizza box and a plastic bag.
"You doze off?" she snorted, sifting a few files out of the way to set the pizza box down.
"I just…closed my eyes for a second." He rubbed his neck. "That was a fast delivery."
"Yeah." She said mildly. "The guy looked like he was going to have a breakdown or something. I think I scared him on the phone." She chuckled at the idea. "Heads up." She tossed a white bottle at him.
He caught it and appreciatively took two of the headache pills out of the bottle, dry-swallowing them. His coffee was still steaming on the table, but ever since Tifa had sworn it off, he found he didn't want it anymore either.
"You look way too used to eating at a desk." He commented, watching her expertly stack her files in a paper fort around her eating zone.
She made a 'sad but true' noise and he folded his arms.
"Seriously, how many times a week do you actually go home?" He asked.
She gave him a weird look. "Why?"
He frowned, "I just noticed you're always here when I'm here, and I'm always here." He shrugged.
"Huh, way to be a creeper, there, Leon." She snorted, pulling out a cheesy piece of pizza from the box.
Leon rolled his eyes. "Whatever."
Tifa ate her first slice of pizza, looking like she was pondering.
"You are always here." She looked at him. "Do you even have a home away from this damn place?"
He sighed, "Yeah, but it's impractical."
She bobbed her head, starting on a breadstick. "Same here."
"You'd think with all the hours we log working together, it would make more sense to share an apartment." He said absently, looking idly at the files waiting for him at the edge of the table.
Tifa grunted and finished off her breadstick. "Really?"
"Hm?" He looked back at her, inwardly debating on whether he could glare the reports into writing themselves.
"The sharing an apartment thing. It would make more sense." She pointed out.
"It would?" He blinked, not having seriously considered it because, well…eh, he didn't know.
"Sure." Tifa dusted the crumbs off her fingers. "Neither of us stay enough in our own separate apartments to justify paying rent. When we're here, we're working together 80 percent of the time anyway." She reasoned, "How great would it be to be able to work in an apartment on a couch instead of the boardroom of an office?"
Leon gave her a measured look, "That sounds counter-productive."
Tifa tilted her head. "A little, but if there was an apartment close to headquarters, I don't know, maybe it'd be more rational."
He quirked an eyebrow at her. "You're just prolonging conversation to delay getting back to work."
She pointed flatly at her pizza. "I'm on break, smartass. Conversation with me is a perk."
They fell quiet for a moment after that, and then Leon's thoughts spoke for him.
"You're serious?"
"I take my breaks very seriously." She replied austerely.
"No, no, the apartment thing."
Tifa looked at him evenly. "Does it not make sense to you?"
Leon shrugged. "Sense, yes, but logic…"
"What's the difference?" She smirked.
He opened his mouth to reply, came up with no snappy reproach, and closed it, settling for an absent shrug.
Another beat passed.
"Do you want to?" Tifa prompted.
He shrugged. "Like you said, it makes sense, but I didn't think you'd actually consider it."
"Look, I'm not asking you to marry me or anything. Lighten up." She teased. "For the sake of convenience, we'd only be splitting rent."
Leon looked at her. "All right fine. One condition."
"And what's that?" Tifa played along.
"Duke." He said. "She can't keep running around the Headquarters. I don't leave her at my apartment now because…well, my apartment is crap."
"So…" Tifa grinned, "Your only condition to sharing apartment with me, is that I would have to tolerate your adorably lovable dog?" She snorted, "Boy, are you easy."
Leon huffed. "Fine, what're your conditions?"
Tifa straightened professionally in her seat. "My own bathroom, the couch from my current apartment, none of the renters on Fifth Street—"
"What's wrong with Fifth Street?" He asked curiously.
"Jake Alms." She hissed like it left a sour taste in her mouth.
Leon smirked at the name of the town flirt and self proclaimed ladies' man. Tifa was so out of Jake's league, it almost wasn't funny.
"Deal?" She offered her hand over the paper turrets of her file fort.
Leon shook his head as he shook her hand briefly.
"All right, now get back to work…slacker." He chided.
Tifa flicked him her middle finger as she pulled out a second slice of pizza. She paused and then lifted up the box. "Want some…roomie?"
He rolled his eyes. "Oh god, we aren't going to have to make matching bracelets or anything, are we?"
She laughed and he snatched the pizza box from her, taking a piece for himself. "Don't make fun of me. I'll soon know where you live!"
He gave her a flat look. "Now who's the creeper?"
She pulled her chair back up to the table to get back to work. "You're a jerk."
"Yeah, yeah."
They both prepared for another round of work, the short break a brief reprieve. After just a few minutes, Tifa groaned and hastily scribbled her signature on a report.
"This is stupid."
..:--X--:..
Leon carried in the last box, nudging the door shut with his boot. Tifa didn't even look up, leaning forward on that hideous dealbreaker couch, lid of the pen in her mouth as she scribbled on her last report.
One week after agreeing to become roommates, they had scoured Radiant Garden until snatching up this apartment, a tiny, function-only set-up just three blocks from the Headquarter building.
Now the last box was in and it looked like Tifa had just caught up on paperwork. He felt a wave of relief. He wasn't sure if his hand would ever recover from the writing cramp.
"Last one." He announced, placing the box on the teetering stack beside the mass of boxes in the hallway.
Tifa looked up, sliding the pen back into the lid and tossing it on the table. "Me too."
"Really?" He smirked.
"No." She groaned, pointing to a box of hanging files at the end of the coffee table.
He grunted at that. "No rest for the weary."
Tifa sat back in the couch and rubbed her eyes. Leon left her to it and glanced around. The apartment looked even smaller and more cramped with all of his stuff and her stuff in stacked boxes all over the place. The apartment itself had come empty, save for the barest furniture and appliances. This wasn't a big deal, since he doubted the place would serve as much more than a place to crash between shifts. Still, it was better than his older apartment, cheaper too. He looked over to the two bedrooms, each with its own bathroom and shower.
"You want to flip a coin?" He offered.
Tifa didn't open her eyes. "Too much effort."
Duke was barking outside in the outdoor hallway of the third floor of the apartment building.
"I'm coming. I'm coming." He walked over and opened the door again.
The dog, who had been pawing at the other side of the door, tore past him into the apartment, claws clicking across the wooden floor. She barked twice, tail thudding against boxes as she inspected her new home herself. Leon and Tifa both watched her idly until she headed into one of the bedrooms.
"Anyway." Tifa started after that little event ended. "How did you find a pet-friendly apartment this close to Radiant Garden?"
"It wasn't pet-friendly, but after all the crap we've had to do for the Alliance lately, rules can be bent." He sank onto the couch next to her.
"Nice." She snickered.
"By the way, this couch is the color of vomit." He remarked.
"Don't hate."
"Where did you find this, a crack house?"
"Shut up. I love this couch."
They were both quiet for a moment.
Then Tifa relaxed deeper into the couch, closing her eyes.
"If she's peeing in there, that's your room."
Leon shot off the couch, darting into the bedroom where Duke had disappeared. A beat passed and then…
"Dammit." was the grunt of dismay.
Tifa twisted in her seat, watching Leon lead Duke by the neck to the door, reprimanding her in a quiet grumble.
"Well, she's marked her territory. Looks like this is officially home." Tifa chuckled.
Leon gave her a flat look and she laughed harder. He pointed wordlessly to the stack of unfinished paperwork waiting on the table. She sobered immediately.
"You're a jerk. I'm going to train Duke to mark her territory on your leg."
Leon just closed the door behind him as he took Duke outside.
Tifa snatched up her pen and got back to work. "Stupid."