Disclaimer: I don't own Kingdom Hearts, its characters or storyline. This collection is mine.

Hoo-boy, where to begin with this one? Firstly, quite a bit of creative license was taken with this prompt; it does take place in my Alliance-verse. As implausible as this may seem, I see a big amount of potential in this one for a future full-length story. I had loads of fun writing it. So, everybody put on your flexible-brain hats and let's dig in.

..:-X-:..

012 – I Dreamt I Was a Moron

(For The Sacred and Profane; Prompt: 'Tifa meets Laguna, Squall unable to stop his father from telling all the embarrassing baby stories he can.')

"…and I left him alone for thirty seconds, tops, and when I came back…" The man made twin dramatic arm gestures. "Every single pot, pan, and skillet in the kitchen was on the floor."

Leon groaned and put his palm over his face, grimacing. "Okay, that's enough."

Beside him, Tifa looked absolutely giddy. "Well, Leon, I didn't realize you were such a trouble maker as a child."

"Trouble maker?" His father laughed cheerfully. "This one time, when he was really young, he got into his mother's make up drawer and ended up with bright red lipstick all the way around—" He ran a finger in a wide berth around his lips.

Tifa had a hand over her mouth and her other arm around her ribs to contain the giggles, even as Leon sent her a scolding look. Laguna rambled on.

"I might even have..." He dug his wallet out of his back pocket, flipping through the numerous pictures inside. "Yep. Checkitcheckitcheckit." He whipped one of them out.

Tifa took it and Leon saw his two-year old self in the middle of the pictures, looking like he'd been drawn on with clown make up for the wide swath of red around his mouth. Tifa laughed so hard that she snorted and Leon snatched the picture away from her.

"He may have gotten his good looks from me, but everything else he got from his mom…and her good looks too." Laguna boasted. "There was this ball pit, right? And…how old were you…Three? Four? Anyway, he got into this ball pit and started trying to arrange different sections of the pit by the color of the ball."

Leon felt his face burning. "Everybody does nonsensical stuff like that when they're kids."

Tifa, however, lifted a finger. "Oh, wait, but last week I caught you arranging the silver ware in the drawer by the designs on the handles."

Laguna chuckled along with her, looking to Leon. "Really?"

Hunching his shoulders defensively, Leon murmured under his breath, "That way they're in order."

"Right, right. You show those spoons and forks who's boss, son." Laguna clapped his hand over Leon's shoulder, causing Leon to shrink into himself further. He abruptly looked back toward Tifa. "Did he tell you about the cat?"

Tifa's eyebrow shot up, and so did Leon's head. "No."

"No." Leon repeated forcefully to his father. "No cat stories."

"Well, now you HAVE to tell cat stories." Tifa looked merry in his torture.

Laguna winked at her, "I like you. Anyway, his sister Ellone adopted this cat and named it Peaches…and this cat—" He was already snickering. "—did not like little Squall."

"Leon." Leon absently corrected.

"We eventually had to get the thing de-clawed because it would launch itself at him whenever he tried to pet it." Laguna chortled. "Peaches was the nicest, sweetest little feline that you would ever meet…but for some reason, it just did not like Squall."

"Leon." He corrected again flatly. "I hated that cat."

"What eventually happened to Peaches?" Tifa inquired.

Laguna shrugged, "One summer she just ran away, never to be seen or heard from again." He elbowed Leon, "Squall told his sister that the neighbor probably cooked it in a stew."

Tifa gawked, "Leon, that's horrible."

Leon lifted his hands to argue. "The neighbor was nuts. She was this crazy old lady who sold wooden shoes off her front porch. It was a plausible explanation."

"She probably just ran away because you tried to vacuum her so many times." Laguna folded his arms.

Tifa looked mortified and curious at the same time.

"I was six. I vacuumed everything." Leon responded.

"Oh yes, I had forgotten that you were quite the vacuum maestro when you were that age." Laguna tapped his chin. "Vacuumed the floor, the rugs, the curtains, the cat, the garden, your sister…" He suddenly burst out laughing, "And what was that one song that you would jam on the stereo whenever you did it?"

Tifa looked from Laguna to Leon. "You used to SING while you vacuumed?" She then whispered, "Who are you?"

Laguna bobbed his head, humming the tune, "Hold on, I'll remember if I can get to the chorus…da-dadum—da-da-da-dum…" He snapped his fingers and spun to Leon, bursting out into song. "It's the…EYE OF THE TIGER, it's the thrill of the fight…RISING UP to the challenge of our rival—" He egged on Leon to join.

Leon pursed his lips, not going along with this. Laguna remained poised in his stance and Tifa snickered. "He's not moving on until you do it."

Seeing no way out, Leon sighed and mumbled, "And the last known survivor stalks his prey in the night."

Laguna bounced into some form of violent air guitar, belting out the lyrics, "And he's watching us all with the EYEEEEEEEEE of the tiger!" Just as smoothly, he dropped out of the air guitar and back into his lax stance, looking Tifa. "It was playing on the radio when we first brought him home from the hospital. Love at first tune." He winked.

Leon had just about had his fill of this game. He hadn't even really wanted to meet up with his father. This afternoon had been all Tifa's doing. She was convinced that he would be happier if he could mend the gap between him and his old man. But that was just it. There wasn't a gap to mend. The man had raised him almost single handedly after his mother died, but they were just different people.

Different being that Leon wasn't an overgrown man-child with the attention span of a brick.

Laguna was prattling on again—Leon caught the gist of some story about how he had been afraid of thunderstorms when he was little—but Leon looked to Tifa, who was soaking in every word like a sponge. Why? What had spurred this sudden interest in his family history? There wasn't much to tell. It wasn't all that interesting. Did she think that he was unhappy because of it or something? He had been happier for the past few months than he had been in the past 10 or so years.

Where was all of this coming from?

He shook his head to clear his thoughts and looked across the street. A woman, probably in her early thirties or late twenties, was sitting at an outdoor café. This was not an uncommon sight in this part of Radiant Garden, and Leon would have gone back to trying to save his dignity from his father's clutches, but the woman was…staring at him. Just…blatantly, shamelessly staring in a way that he couldn't interpret. So Leon stared back.

She looked familiar, but he couldn't place who she was or why he recognized her. She had short brown hair that fell to her chin, fair skin, and was wearing a blue sleeveless blouse and a white pencil skirt. A green shawl hung around her elbows and looped around her back. She almost looked…remorseful? Before he could figure out what to make of this development, the mysterious woman lifted a finger to her lips in a hushing motion.

"—right, Squall?" Laguna's voice brought him back to the conversation.

Leon looked to Laguna and then to Tifa, having no idea what he'd just been asked. "Um, I don't—" He looked back across the street.

The woman was gone.

"Ha!" Laguna pointed at him, as though his lack of response was incriminating.

Tifa snorted into her fist.

Leon was still too wrongfooted by the strange woman's appearance and disappearance to properly respond, and it must have shown, because Tifa touched his arm.

"Are you okay?" She asked, still amused.

He looked to Laguna, but his vision was a little fuzzy. "Yeah, I—"

Tifa canted her head, "What? That was clearly at his eyes. No way that was a strike."

Leon frowned, "What?"

Suddenly, like a bungee cord tied around his chest, Leon felt himself be jerked backward off his feet. It felt like he was thrown through a wall, and with a snap, he found himself sitting up in his chair, hands spread across the paper-strewn surface of the kitchen table at his house. A piece of paper was stuck to the side of his face, and he could see Tifa sitting on the sectional couch in the living room across the hallway, watching a baseball game on the television.

"What is wrong with this umpire? Is he blind?" Tifa was ranting, gesturing at the screen.

Cold disorientation poured over Leon and he pawed at his face to get rid of the paper. The writing on the papers across the table looked like chicken scratch, all meshing together in a confusing mess. That had…all been a dream. He had just fallen asleep at the table after…Right, it was starting to come back. He had been sorting through new applicants' paperwork for the weapons specialist program, of which he was the head of the department. A few applicants had been painfully thorough in their genealogies…Family history must have been on his mind…

Still…what the Hell?

"You okay?" Tifa had looked over and noticed his frazzled state.

Mind still spinning, Leon clamored roughly out of his chair and crossed into the hallway, bee-lining up the stairs to the second floor.

"Leon—" Tifa sounded like she was following out of concern.

Staggering slightly when he misjudged the top step, Leon hooked left down the second floor hallway to the closet that they used for storage.

This wasn't making sense. Sure, half of one's dreams were utter nonsense anyway, but there was always a grain of truth, some shred of logic to them. Why in Kingdom Hearts had he dreamed of some…some weirdo named Laguna being his father?

As he pulled open the closet door and started rummaging through the boxes on the top shelf inside, Leon tried to hold onto that dream image of the man. He looked familiar, and he knew that he recognized that name. Finding the box that he was looking for, Leon dragged it out from the shelf and ended up dropping in on the floor in his haste. By then, Tifa had reached the top of the stairs and was looking at him in bewilderment.

"What's going on? You're pale." She asked.

Leon had been adopted by his maternal uncle and aunt. He knew that. They had never told him as much, and they were dead now thanks to the invasion of Radiant Garden by the Heartless over ten years ago. His mind still wrestled with plausible reasons as to why they hadn't told him themselves, why he'd had to find out later, in an accidental contact with some old personnel files. Had they thought that he couldn't handle it? He had been 17 when the Heartless came. He had handled THAT; he sure as Hell could have handled—

Hitting his knees, he had flipped open the box and shuffled through the mess inside. It was one of five or six boxes of personal possessions that he had salvaged from his childhood home in the old residential district before the Alliance had flattened the entire area. The house had been in shambles—ten years of war against the Heartless, looting, and squatting had not been kind to it—and the small manor had been stripped of most valuables and dignity. Still, he had managed to recover some things, like his mother's—aunt's—brass chess set and a few photo albums.

Like the weathered blue one that found his hands at that moment.

Leon forced himself to breathe as he looked at the little album. He had been adopted because his biological mother had died a few days after he was born…complications…her death certificate had been filed in the same box as his birth certificate. Her name had been Raine Leonhart. There had been no father listed on his birth certificate. And by the time he had found those documents, his adoptive parents were dead...not exactly available for explanation.

Which had left him with a thousand questions and not one damn answer.

Tifa was on her knees beside him, quiet. She had never seen the inside of those boxes that he had taken from his old house. She had learned not to ask. It was his past, and that was where it needed to stay. But this…this was different. This was…not possible.

He rifled through several pages of the album. Most of the pictures looked to have been taken when he was roughly five or six years old. He stopped in the middle of turning a page, his eyes finding what he had been looking for: a photo of his dad—uncle, he mentally corrected with a grimace—holding a rifle in one hand and had his other arm flung around…him. Laguna. Both men were in hunting gear and camouflage. That was where Leon recognized him from: Laguna Loire had been hunting buddies with his dad—er, uncle. Leon remembered seeing him on occasion, but when he had been eight or nine years old, the man had stopped showing up. Like he'd disappeared off the face of the planet, and neither of his adoptive parents had spoken of him after…and Leon hadn't asked. Hadn't noticed really, too busy being eight years old.

"Leon, you're scaring me." Tifa's gentle voice dragged him back to reality.

He looked at her briefly, tearing his eyes away from the picture. Why would his subconscious drag this man back from the wells of his past for the sake of some cracky dream? Who was the woman who had stared at him in the dream? Tifa touched his shoulder.

"Who is that?" She asked softly, looking at the hunting picture.

He grimaced against a coming headache. "I don't know." He murmured.

But he had to find out.

..:-X-:..

A/N: I have poked at Leon's lineage as a possible storyline before, but for some reason, this prompt really got my creative juices going. This follows the consistency of other ditties and oneshots that I've written where Leon's parents and childhood are mentioned. I would LOVE to do a full story on it eventually…time willing.

The title comes from the line from Squall in FFVIII. Also, no ownership or affiliation with the band Survivor or their song "Eye of the Tiger."

All of these prompts so far have been awesome! Feel free to keep submitting!

Happy Father's Day!