|Zack Liked Candy|

[disclaimer: eat, sleep, rest and take breaks from work or this happens to your brain.]


Zack liked candy.
It wasn't something out of the ordinary when you're around ten years old to like candy a lot more than any other food around the house so nobody really gave it much thought. At least nobody but Zack. The constant evil plotting going on inside his spikey black head mostly involved how to get the candy that was being kept away from him until after dinner. For some pretty good reasons, Zack wasn't the kind of child who could remain calm after eating pixie stix. Nor did he exactly want to.

Not that the fact the candy was out of reach was going to stop him. There were other children of course, mostly close to his age, and Zack knew that with a little convincing most of them would help him. Sort of. Maybe. During the day they stayed together in a sort of play group at his friend's house while the adults went off to work, or whatever it was they did all day that involved them having to come home and be horrendously boring. When you are ten, anyone who's boring isn't worth your time. God no.

"HOLD STILL VIN!"

"Highwind! NO!"

Fortunately, Zack thought smiling to himself and puffing at one of the black spikey bangs in his eyes, his friends weren't boring at all. Across the room, Cid and Vin were busy causing eachother grief. More like Cid was causing Vin greif. Cid was short, even for being ten, and had scruffy blonde hair. He watched too many movies and had decided he wanted to be an astronaut, a pilot and an inventor when he grew up. Zack figured he'd just become a superhero. When you asked Vin what he wanted to be, most of the time he burst into tears. But Vin cried at a lot. Like he was crying right now. The reason for those particular tears was that Cid was trying to launch his rubber band powered model plane off Vin's back. The plane made it a good distance away before the strands of Vin's long black hair got tangled in the rubber band and it crashed to the floor. Cid completely ignored Vin's tears and ran to retrieve his plane, picking it gingerly off the floor.

"Vin you stupid dog-brained floor mold head! You screwed it up!"

Wiping a floppy black sleeve from his oversized sweatshirt over his eyes, Vin sniffled a little bit. "S...sorry Highwind..." Zack didn't even have to count to three before Vin was running across the room crying, diving into his favourite hiding spot. Under the couch.

Cid tried to stand it stoicly a minute. He folded his arms across his chest, the balsa wings of the plane wobbling as his skinny little shoulders shook in fury. "Vin you moron! You idiot! Don't cry!" Giving up and making a disgusted sound, Cid began to stalk after the couch rolling his eyes and throwing his limbs around in an exageration of contempt before Zack clapped around his upper arm.

"Heya shortie," Zack grinned for a minute before Cid's immidiate reaction got to him and he was pounded to the ground with a very irate short blonde ten year old beating somewhere around his shoulderblades and the back of his head still managing to not damage his model plane.

"DON'T CALL ME SHORTIE YOU SPIKE HAIRED WORM BRAIN! YOU SUCK!" Cid proceeded to pound Zack until he stopped laughing and started shouting 'ow' at increased volumes. Cid was short, but he was strong, and by the time he finally stopped beating on Zack he was breathing hard enough to make the front of his blue tie-dyed shirt shake up and down. "Don't EVER call me that!" He growled, as intimidating as someone before puberty and short on the side can be.

Zack flailed and tried to shake Cid off him. "Ow, ow! I give up! Uncle! GI Joe! Orvell Wright! SOMETHING! Get off!" Squirming around, Cid finally stood up and got off Zack, who stood and brushed himself off, trying to regain compuse. Ten year olds do not lose fights, they only pretend to. Everyone knows that. You have to make the other guy feel good sometime. Cid glared at him for a few minutes before remembering he was supposed to be comforting the black haired little boy hiding under the couch crying a puddle into the carpet. He could still hear him of course. It was hard to miss the screaming for dust bunnies to eat him and end his suffering.

"Yeah well. You still suck." Cid muttered to himself and began to turn back on course to find Vin, but Zack grabbed his arm again. Zack pointed with his free hand towards the couch and grinned.

"I'd get him out from under there soon."

"Uh huh," Cid wanted to go find Vin and get back to playing with his plane and eating candy cigarettes but everyone knew Zack would try to kill you for your candy, so he refrained from nibbling on one right that moment. "And the reason would be why, Moogle Face?"

"Cause Seph is sitting on the couch watching cartoons and Vin's going to interupt them for him if he keeps crying so loud."

Cid opened his mouth to snap something back, but realized that oh my, this is not a joking situation, and broke Zack's grip in record time. He didn't have far to go to the couch, but Seph had less space to cover that involved dropping his stuffed rabbit over the side upside down and toying with Vin's pre-teen angsty brain.

"I've come to DEVOUR YOU Vincent!" Seph laughed evily and jiggled the rabbit around over the edge of the couch which just made Vin scream and the pillows begin bouncing into the air as the black haired ten year old tried franticly to pull himself out from the deadly dust bunny territory. This failed miserably because the fast approuching Cid didn't have time to dodge and tripped over his own untied shoelaces as well as Vin's backwards-crawling body. The shorter ten year old went sprawling across the room as Vin was dragged along accidentally, shreiking in his normal high pitched fashion. Zack cringed, and Sephiroth just pointed and laughed evilly. Sephiroth was a scary white haired demon child.

Cid and Vin turned into a quickly moving ball of insults and apologies as they scrambled to untangle themselves and it was into this chaos that another, less short blonde stepped. In actuality he was probobly shorter than Cid, but the way he kept his hair combed nearly straight in the air made him seem taller. He was still comparably shorter than Seph, Zack and Vin. But considering Seph was too evil to care about that kind of thing, Zack too candy-obsessed and Vin too busy sitting on the floor most of the time, it wasn't one of the things that was mentioned in their little daycare. Seph took one look at the approuching blonde boy and rolled his eyes, pulling his rabbit back into his lap and glaring dangerously across the room. For a ten year old in a black nylon windbreaker and torn up blue jeans, Seph was decidedly deadpan and intimidating when he needed to be. Unlike Cid.

Zack picked up one of the pillows that had managed to launch itself off the couch in Vin's sofa-shaking panic and lobbed it at the spikey blonde, nearly knocking him off balance once it hit him square in the face. Grinning nearly ear to ear, he waved one hand exstaticly at the shocked blonde. "Hey Cloud! Glad you could make it! I thought maybe you got picked up from school or something."

"No...not really..." Still shaken from the pillow to the face, Cloud was the silent type anyway and so spoke probobly fewer words than Vincent, if one counted incoherant sobbing sounds. Cloud dressed similar to Zack, mostly because their mothers had been friends before they were both born and they'd known eachother since as far back as either could remember. Zack didn't care, it meant that if his shirt ripped at school he could usually let it go unnoticed for a few days at a time. Since they tried not to wear the same cloths on the same day, it wasn't all that hard.

Seph let out a disgusted sigh and glared somewhere off to the side into the void of TV. "Oh great, the copycat's here."

Cloud's normally stoicly confused face blushed an angry red as he dug his fingers into the couch pillow, glaring. "I'm inot/i a copycat."

"Say what you want, copycat."

"I'm not a copycat!" Cloud was getting more emotionally involved than Seph, who seemed to just be replying as a way of keeping breathing.

"Are too."

"I am not and I'll kick iyour/i butt to prove it!" Cloud gripped the pillow at the corner, spreading his feet apart and readying to throw it across the room. Seph darted one slightly icey-green eye over the spikey blonde and smirked to himself.

"I don't think you're going to want to deal with my mother if you do that..."

Zack scratched the back of his head and shrugged. "He has a point, Cloud. Seph, what iis/i your mom? She's freaky, I'm sorry. But she's just-"

"SHUT UP!" Sephiroth was now actually glaring full on at Zack and digging his nails into the arms of his stuffed rabbit, growling. "Shut. Up."

Zack wiggled his fingers, because he had no concept of danger and so didn't know there was deffinitly a major error of judgement in doing so. "Ooo...Usagi-chan is getting angry. What're you gonna do, poke us with your bangs?"

"JERK!" Sephiroth shot off the couch at an impossiable angle and speed, looking a lot more like he was flying than walking, which on hindsight is actually probobly the more likely. Zack maybe blinked once before he was being beaten up again. That's what happens when you're too focused on sugar to know when to hold your tongue. Oh yes it is.

Cid, who had by this time disentangled himself from the hystericly crying Vin only to have Vin lock his arms around Cid in a death grip watched in pure surprise from the sidelines. "Holy Hawaiian tuna, Zack, did you talk about his hair this time, or his mom?"

Zack's response managed to be as coherant as "AUGHDOOOOOWWWWWW."

[To Be Continued, when I regain hyperactivity ...]