Those Days:
Summary: Balamb Garden bores Seifer, but Squall just irritates him.
Author's Note: This is an exploration on Squall and Seifer's relationship in the game – or, at least, how I always personally read it… It didn't quite turn out how I expected – it's a bit too friendly – but I just let the writing go where it wanted to. First time with FF8, unsure of characterisation, reviews appreciated.
Seifer leaned his head on the back of the seat, keeping a close eye on the bustle in the cafeteria surrounding him. Class was over, and he was bored. He could have gone to the library, but it wasn't the sort of place where he decided to spend time, and so he'd adopted a familiar task.
"You should look at that guy, ya know," Raijin offered, seated to the left of Seifer and pointing at a blond haired boy probably not much younger than him.
Flanking him on the right, Fujin said, "PUSHING." Fujin wasn't somebody to waste words; Seifer, who'd learned how to understand her 'language' years ago, figured it meant something along the lines of 'he was shoving people in the line'. It would fit with what Seifer had just observed.
"Yeah," Seifer agreed, getting to his feet, eyes on the boy who looked as sad as if he'd just missed a t-rexaur sighting in the Training Centre. Stalking up to him, Seifer announced himself with an, "Oi!"
The blond boy looked at him with a peculiar expression on his face. "Hi, Seifer," he said warily, and Seifer wondered if he should know him.
(Zell Dincht, his mind supplied later, but it wasn't an important detail.)
"You're on the list." Seifer smirked, and if he was pre-empting it a bit, he really didn't care. He'd seen what the boy had done, and it was too good an opportunity to pass up. To his credit, the boy didn't need to ask what he was talking about: the Disciplinary Committee was infamous among the students. They'd take issue with someone breathing if they felt like it, though the boy in this case had committed an actual error in etiquette. Garden was supposed to teach better.
The boy scowled, his fists bunched up and looking ready to punch him. There was no sign of a weapon on the boy, but even if there had been, Seifer wouldn't have been particularly intimidated. For a military academy, it was Seifer's opinion that Balamb Garden had a disturbing number of students who'd be dead five minutes into a real fight. Nontheless, Raijin and Fujin reacted to the aggression and moved closer, a threat in numbers alone and Fujin's gaze that promised pain – for somebody who communicated so little by words, she had other ways of getting the point across.
Obviously reluctantly, the boy said, "…Fine!" and practically stomped off. Seifer was unrepentant, and found himself being a little annoyed the boy hadn't swung for him. It'd at least have been entertaining. Chatter was bubbling around the cafeteria, and of the bits of it Seifer was close enough to hear, there was some grumbling about the Disciplinary Committee, and about that poor boy (by a girl who had been shoved by the blond boy, no less!).
Seifer sneered and looked away, and that was how he saw Squall Leonhart, sitting at a table and looking at him with a blank expression. His eyes narrowed when he saw Seifer looking at him, but he otherwise didn't react.
Seifer couldn't complain because, right then, Squall was exactly who he wanted to see. He glanced at Raijin and Fujin and said, "Hey, I have something to sort out. You can find something to do?"
They were friends, but this wasn't conversation: it was an order. Raijin looked like he might protest, but Fujin grabbed him by the arm and stared hard at Seifer. "DEBT," she said instead, which in non-Fujin-speak probably meant something like 'you owe us', and dragged him off out of the cafeteria.
Seifer's eyes went back to Squall, who hadn't moved, and he stalked over to him.
"Hey," Seifer said, and that was when Squall looked away, because violence sure didn't threaten him, but conversation did. The boy was ridiculously anti-social.
Seifer never gave up that easily. He'd have to start pushing Squall's buttons: unfortunately, what exactly they were always seemed a little hazy with Squall. "I'm talking to you, you moron," he tried instead, but beyond a tightening of the lips, it yielded no response.
He went for a different target, seeing what Squall felt touchy about today. "I can write you up for not talking, you know," he said, even though it wasn't true.
Squall snorted. "…Whatever," he said, which was at least a word, but it was also Squall's standard reply to everything in life. In all the time the two had been at Balamb Garden – and they'd both been there as long as Seifer could remember, always smaller and looking upward at the other students for a long time – Seifer doubted he'd heard Squall say more than about thirty different words.
And for Squall, that was pretty good going and came from hours of provocation leading to Squall glowing at the sight of him.
Seifer didn't mind at all. He didn't like Squall and his excessive isolation, his turn of the lips as if everybody was too good for him, including Seifer. He doubted they'd ever get along; they'd always clashed, from childhood squabbles brewing to some sort of teenage rivalry. Some people might have assumed they had an odd sort of friendship, but one founded on trying to provoke the other person for the desired outcome probably wasn't the healthiest relationship.
"Did you see what happened with that kid?" Seifer scoffed.
"I don't care," said Squall, who'd learned a long time ago that the battle was lost against Seifer when he got you to open your mouth.
"Thought I saw you starting. Anything going on I should know about?" He waggled his eyebrows suggestively, and interestingly, it was that that caused the deepset irritation, Squall's expression turning deadly and grasping the chair he was sitting on to make wrinkles in the material.
"Knock it off, Seifer," the boy growled as a warning. For all his intellect, he still hadn't learned that this wasn't something Seifer feared; it was the whole point.
"Make me." He grinned. It sounded childish, it was childish, but he didn't really care. "I want to train."
Squall seemed to have decided to stop being so generous with his words and turned away. That was okay, too: Seifer had no problem carrying out a conversation for two people.
"I don't really care what you want," he added.
"Why don't you ever train with somebody else?" It was practically a snarl of frustration, and it took all of Seifer's effort to keep the smirk off his face. He suspected he hadn't completely succeeded when an extra shade of expression – anger – crossed Squall's normally bored-looking face.
Seifer stared at him incredulously. "You must be joking," he remarked, but didn't say anything further. He turned around and headed back to his dormitory room, thinking about the question Squall had posed (even though it was probably rhetorical: Squall didn't like giving people hooks to actually participating in a conversation with him).
Seifer liked to be challenged. The people at Balamb Garden bored him as they either treated fighting like some kind of game, or were just plain incompetent. Not only was Squall a fellow gunblade user, which was a rare speciality, but the boy actually showed some level of competence, not that Seifer would admit it out loud.
He still wasn't as good as Seifer, anyway, and he intended for it to stay that way.
Squall was the one person worth in any way paying attention to, and Seifer was treated for his troubles like scum on the bottom of a shoe. Maybe he was seeing the personality incompatibility that Seifer did, or maybe it was just him being Squall: the boy didn't seem to get along amicably with anybody, though Seifer secretly suspected he wasn't the only person who enjoyed their duels: the one thing they seemed to share was feeling the life in battle compared to the dullness of Balamb Garden. It was for that reason that he knew Squall well enough to know that he wouldn't waste time fetching his gunblade, either.
Their budding rivalry, at least, was far more interesting than any friendship could have been.
Author's Note: Weak ending. Not a big surprise, given that I wrote this… I always felt in the games that among everyone in Balamb Garden, Squall and Seifer seemed to have an understanding. They didn't get along, but Seifer seems to regard Squall as the only person worthy of fighting him, and even stuff like the talk of the 'romantic dream' – they can obviously talk to some degree, whether it's mocking or not. Add that to Squall's subsequent thoughts on Seifer after they think he's been executed… I wanted to explore that relationship, so this is what we got.