Disclaimer: I don't own Kingdom Hearts, its characters or storyline. These ditties are mine. Could it be…some character development this chapter? (le gasp!) Well, there's not really too much of it, but the prompt called for some exploration of where Leon and Cloud are in their enemy/ally status. For those unfamiliar with my Alliance-verse, for a long time, Leon and Cloud HATED each other. They're getting a little better now, but…you'll see. Enjoy!

..:-X-:..

010 – Frienemies and Origami

(For WishingDreamer5; Prompt: 'the rivalry between Cloud and Leon')

After slaving over the mountains of data memory towers and network devices for three hours, Cid finally called a timeout just long enough for Leon and Cloud to come up for air.

"I'm going to try rebooting the system again." Cid called down from the catwalk that connected Tron's computer room to the rest of the old office of Ansem the Wise. "Gimme a few minutes."

"A few minutes." Leon grumbled, glaring up from where he and Cloud had been working, several stories below. "Cid, it's an oven down here. Give it some time to cool down."

"A'right, don't get your panties in a wad." Cid grumbled. "How about a half hour? Does that suit Your Highness?"

Leon just flipped Cid his middle finger and the older man snorted, disappearing back into the computer room. Cloud sorely maneuvered away from the piles of electronics that they had been sorting through. Due to some new glitch in the computer wiring, the security system around Radiant Garden had been on the fritz. The three of them had been working on the mechanism all day and hardly made any progress. Whatever the glitch was had also been making Tron flighty and irritable, so the quirky program hadn't been much help.

Which meant that while Cid got to poke and pry at the computer way up in the air conditioned office, Cloud and Leon had been banished to manually checking all of the network towers in the cavernous chamber below, where the overheating machines had created an atmosphere equivalent to Hell.

Efforts to update the old security system had been ongoing for the past few months, but it was slow progress. So much so that desks and chairs and a mini-fridge had winged their ways down to the lower chamber, just for days like this: where people were stuck down here doing constant checks and reconfigurations.

Cloud could handle work. He enjoyed hard work and being left to his own devices in that work. After being around Leon so often lately, he had figured out that the other man was exactly the same way. That all would have been well and good, had they had not the tendency to get at each other's throats at the slightest provocation.

Fortunately, the heat and fatigue of the afternoon had squashed any desire to start a fight, so the two men just took the opportunity to take a break from the machines and sit down.

"He's a slave driver." Cloud grumbled, dropping into the seat to the left of the weathered desk, behind which Leon was sitting.

Leon shrugged, poking at the pile of paper wads that had been left on top of the desk. "You get used to it."

There was just the slightest drop of condescension in his tone.

Cloud straightened a little. "I wasn't complaining."

"I wasn't insinuating that you were." Leon took up one of the paper wads, unfolding it.

Yes you were, Cloud thought, but settled for narrowing his eyes.

Cloud was unsure about many things, but of one thing he was certain: Leon was a smug bastard. Cloud didn't deny that the man had done some impressive things: rebuilding Radiant Garden, organizing the Restoration Committee, and surviving one of Tifa's right hooks not among the least of them. But it wasn't even those big impressive things that he was a smug bastard about. It was the small, bizarre things—like completing his quarterly patrol reports before Yuffie did and when his dog marked her territory on Fenrir. It was all the more salt on the wounds when Cloud looked at the Venn Diagram that was the comparison between himself and Leon.

One was head of the Restoration Committee, running the weapons specialist department of the Alliance, happily married, enjoying newlywed-hood in a new house, and garnering the respect of pretty much every soul in Radiant Garden. The other was a drifter, tied just loosely enough to the Restoration Committee to be put on paperwork duty, with an undefined relationship status, living in a rinky-dink apartment on the fringe of the city, and lucky to have six people in the world know his name.

Sure, they had put most of the ugliness behind them, but there was a competitive rivalry that he doubted would ever completely be extinguished. And while it was nice not to have to worry about the guy sticking pins in a Cloud voodoo doll behind his back, Cloud still couldn't boast being actual friends with the man. Besides, Aerith was the one who kept—

"What are you doing?" Cloud blurted in exasperation.

Leon had been fiddling with and unfolding more of the little paper wads, much to Cloud's irritation.

"McCallister must have worked the last shift down here." Leon said…as if that answered the question.

Cloud gave him a flat look and then gazed at the paper wads. On second glance, they weren't exactly haphazard mashes of paper. They were folded and bent, all identical, like origami or something. The ones that Leon had salvaged so far were lined up on the table beside the pile, and Cloud squinted one eye to make them out.

"Birds?" He prompted.

"Cranes." Leon corrected, unfolding another one. "She folds paper cranes when she's bored."

"That's weird."

Leon glared at him. "Shut up."

He held one of the cranes up by the back, aimed, and threw it toward the cardboard box that they had been using as a trash can. It sailed for a second or two before taking an abrupt nose dive to the right, dropping gracelessly to the concrete floor a few feet from the box.

"You…shut up." Cloud retorted dryly, snatching up one of the cranes.

Leon snickered at the comeback and tossed another crane. This one, with one very bent wing, keeled left immediately and smacked into the floor, not even close to the cardboard box. For a while, Cloud and Leon had been as near to enemies as you could get without actually drawing blood. Along the way, they each had discovered the other's hot buttons: Tifa, Sephiroth, Rinoa, Heartless, fear of failure, insane insecurity levels, and the like. They had then promptly pushed those buttons until one of them exploded.

Strangely, Cloud had never pictured Private McCallister as one of Leon's hot buttons. The soldier was an oddball, to be sure, and she would walk into the jaws of Hell with a smile on her face if Leon told her to…but Cloud had never figured that the feeling between them was mutual.

This could be fun.

"I distinctly remember warning you about her when she was in basic. She's weird." Cloud offered, aiming the crane in his hand toward the trash box and tossing it.

The crane glided for a few feet and then dropped to the floor beside the first crane that Leon had thrown. Cloud's was closer to the box.

Leon pursed his lips and picked up another crane, not biting at the bait. Instead, he threw the crane. This one overshot the box entirely and crashed into one of the overheated computer towers. He hmphed and slouched a little in his seat.

Feeling a little smug now and not completely sure why, Cloud took up a crane, unfolding it from its wadded up state and aiming at the box again.

"These must have taken hours to make." He mused aloud, throwing the thing.

It veered left and plopped to the floor.

"Clearly there's not much to do down here on a patrol shift." Leon quipped, squinting at the underside of the wing of the crane that he was currently holding.

Then, instead of throwing it like the others, he set it aside, almost carefully. When he looked back, he met Cloud's eyes, and Cloud raised an inquiring eyebrow.

"Number 635." Leon explained, indicating the little paper bird. "She only numbers the ones that aren't all bent up and mangled looking when she gets done with them."

When Cloud's other eyebrow went up, Leon grunted.

"She's been trying to reach 1000 paper cranes for about a year now…You know, the whole 'fold a thousand cranes and make a wish' thing." Leon waved a hand absently.

"Yeeeah. She's weird."

"Your face is weird." Leon said, and his defensive tone made Cloud smirk.

But as they continued to throw the paper cranes, trying to aim them into the trash box, Cloud set aside any that he came across with numbers scrawled on them.

For a while, they continued to just sit there, tossing the little cranes toward the trash box. They were just passing time, trying to cool off before being sent back into that mess of wires, monitors, and buttons, and the cranes were there…and…who wouldn't benefit from target practice?

Unfortunately, it was never just idle target practice. After a few minutes, one of Leon's tossed cranes hit the edge of the trash box. It bounced out and landed flat on the floor a foot away. Progress. The bar had been raised. Getting close to the box wasn't good enough now.

Cloud shifted slightly in his seat, taking up yet another paper crane, aiming, and throwing it toward the trash box. It sailed and seemed to actually fly directly toward the cardboard box, and Cloud thought for a wild moment that it would land inside the box and he would win this bizarre impromptu competition.

But then another crane zoomed in and knocked his off-course. Both paper birds flopped to the floor. Cloud exhaled and glared over at Leon, who had haphazardly thrown the thing to intercept Cloud's winning shot.

"You're a dick." Cloud grumbled, folding his arms and sitting back.

This was a stupid game and Leon was stupid too. They were grown men, and they were seriously getting competitive over…over who could throw away crappy paper cranes better?

Leon ignored him, picking up another crane from the dwindling pile. This one apparently didn't have a number on it, because he promptly aimed and threw it. Before he had fully made up his mind to do it, Cloud's leg involuntarily shot out, dropkicking the crane out of the air and away from its intended target. Then, just as quickly, he retracted his foot and returned to his casual position.

Leon blinked at him. "You bitch."

From high above in the computer room, Cid leaned out of the doorway. "Rebooting."

Both Cloud and Leon started slightly, looking up at him.

"All right." Leon replied to him, lowering his gaze.

Locking eyes, the two warriors glared daggers at each other for a long , almost in unison, they snatched up the remainder of the paper cranes and started throwing them at the cardboard box target. Stupid or not, Cloud would be damned if he let Leon beat him at yet another thing in his life. It just wasn't fair. And, at the moment, merely defeating him in this idiotic competition felt like it would alleviate some of that unfairness.

A single paper crane, amidst the army of kamikaze birds, dropped into the box while its brothers and sisters littered the floor around it.

Leon and Cloud stopped, both having jumped to their feet at some point during the heat of it all and both now slightly out of breath from the effort of it. They stared at the single solitary crane, which was lying on its side inside the trash box, neither sure which of them had thrown it.

Oh, this was ridiculous.

"Says it's reconfiguring…" Cid yelled. "What the Hell are you two doing down there?"

Leon broke the stare first with a huff, going to check the whirring towers again. Cloud stood there fuming for a moment before going to do the same.

"Tower 105 Functional." Leon yelled up to Cid after checking the first network tower.

Cloud checked the first tower that he came to, his hands moving of their own accord to verify that it was functional also. Seeing it reconfiguring correctly, he yelled back up to Cid. "Tower 402 Functional."

The lift door by the desk opened then and Aerith stepped out, looking on the verge of telling them something before her gaze fell to the battlefield of thrown paper cranes.

"What in Kingdom Hearts…" She put her hands on her hips and looked to the two. "It took me half an hour to pick these things up and you two just threw them back again."

"Pick them up?" Cloud quirked an eyebrow, exchanging a confused look with Leon. "I think Private McCallister left them down here after her shift."

The soldier definitely did not strike Cloud as one to leave a mess like that behind.

"She did," Aerith huffed. "And then Tifa and Yuffie worked the next shift and thought it would be funny to recreate some…space battle or something. It was a mess…It's not funny, Leon."

Leon was indeed snickering at it, even as Aerith scolded them like they were children and cleaned up the mess a second time. The two resumed yelling affirmatives back up to Cid, who it seemed had finally succeeded in rebooting the entire security system.

"That was my crane that ended up in the box first." Cloud cut in to steal the victory.

"Whatever." Leon's Smug Bastard smirk was back.

"Dick." Cloud hissed.

"Bitch." Leon retorted.

"Oh, will you two cut it out and help me clean this up!"

..:-X-:..

A/N: I feel like Leon came off as kind of an ass-hat in this chapter, which makes me sad because I love him so…but considering it was pretty much through Cloud's perspective, I think that angle makes sense (snort, snort).

If you haven't concluded this already, Leon and Private McCallister have a 'special relationship'. Bless their mutual awkwardness XD