"If you don't like funyuns, why are you eating them?"
"...It's not like I have a choice, they're there aren't they?"
The day was progressing on its usual tilted scale of time, lunch being squeezed in somewhere between ten in the morning and the eleven o'clock classes Zack always wound up with. Freya was in classes too at this point, so he was lucky to even find one of his friends from last year. That was the oddest part about being a sophmore now. It seemed like he almost had to restart entirely with some of his friends, because their scheduals were so radically different.
At the given odd lunch hour he did manage to scrape into, though, Zack's roomie went too. On top of that, there was Zik, who was a friend from the year before. The two personalities of Zidane and Zik contrasted rather intenesly. While Zidane was extroverted and involved himself in anything and everything that would be seen by people in general, Zik tended to keep to himself and speak only when spoken to. That wasn't to say Zik was the kind of person who could quietly disappear into a crowd. To say he was tall was an understatement- Zik was easily bordering on seven feet tall and towered over everyone else he knew. Despite it, he was preportional to his build albiet on the less built side. His cloths were never flashy, never drawing attention, usually consisting of a teeshirt pulled over a darker long sleeved shirt and a pair of tattered jeans.
It was Zik's hair that really doomed him to people's attention. Bright white and reaching down to his hips, it was like a beacon to anyone within visual range. Unlike Sephiroth's hair, which was a slightly more natural silveresque shade, Zik was nearly neon white- it hurt to look at him. And since the startch white bangs framed his face, it took almost half a year for anyone to notice that he was in fact not an albino- Zik's eyes were a captivating green.
So when Zik took a seat at the scraped twenty plus year old lunch table beside his rather cripplingly normal looking compatriots, people were bound to turn and stare. Very little of what the white haired student had to say was anything but direct and biting, but Zidane had been the first to see around that and become accustomed to what he had dubbed "Zik-ese."
The lunch hall wasn't crowded at this point, seeing as the larger number of students made it so they would intentionally have sane eating hours when they signed up for classes. For the most part, there were only a few people with their noses burried in books, trying to figure out exactly what they'd be going into in class today anyway. They were probably either freshman or fanatics, Zack noted. He himself found it exceedingly impossiable to get a grip on what the subject material was before it was being taught.
But then again, he was the one eating funyuns, with no idea why, feeling absolutely ill to his stomach.
"The man who invented these was sick," he muttered, poking one of the frighteningly stiff rings around on the inside of its package. Even the colour of the bag they came in unsettled him. Yellow and green. Something just wasn't right about that combination for a snackfood. Vomit, yes. Lemon lime soda, sure. Maybe even if they were talking in terms of jello. But in terms of a crunchy, salty snackfood, something was just inheretly wrong.
"And yet you're still eating them," Zidane's voice peirced the windowed area of the dining hall, somewhere in the midtones between scratchy and immature. It was difficult to place the accent he spoke with, but it had a distinctly urban feel to it. A theatre tech major, Zidane never wore anything particularly baggy, and his light coloured hair was usually held back in a small ponytail. It was for safety measures around the equipment, Zack knew from a semester in the lighting class. "So who's the really sick one?"
With an exaggerated look of disgust, Zack stopped poking the ..chip..circle...things and pushed them across the table. "Deffinitly me, by this point. Jesus Herman Christ, someone take these away from me," Zik's pale hand crumpled the bag up and placed it on his own lunch tray, "Thank you, there. Was that so hard? Really."
Sitting down and shaking his head, Zidane recognized the entire reference. "Ass," he replied automaticly before spearing a slice of pizza with a fork. As it was the year prior, Zik raised an eyebrow, but nobody said anything about Zidane's way of eating. Zack smirked, realizing that despite the inconvenience of time scheduals, things really wouldn't be that different.
"So, I hear through a reliable white haired beauty that you've got some poor little Froshi in your sites," Zidane picked up the pizza on a fork and began gnawing roughly at the crust. His eyes looked nearly skyward as he did.
...Or not, Zack thought with a sigh. Zidane was always prone to tormenting Freya for dates, even though he wasn't serious. As a result they had a sort of twisted version of friendship. And Zack guessed Freya had decided not to keep quiet about his personal delimea. It didn't bother him as much as it would have...after all, at least Zidane was his room mate. "Eyeah...Something like that. You know, save someone's ass and you get attached to it or something." He ran his hands through his hair and rested his elbows on the table, feeling exhasperated. This would just complicate things.
Zidane laughed around his pizza, and Zik reclined back in the rickety lunch hall chair, his knee propped against the table. "Is he gay?" Blunt as ever, Zack noticed with a wince. Zik's voice was deep and solid, like an unamused version of everyone's archetypal father. It took some getting used to for anyone talking with him to realize Zik wasn't constantly accusing people.
"That...is actually a problem," Zack's eyes drifted to the side, tracing down the wall of the lunch hall. Through a set of double doors into another section of the eating area, barely peeking around a corner, he could see a little flash of distinct blonde every now and again. Maybe he was wrong and it wasn't the kid he'd met. But maybe... "I don't know."
"So ask him." Zik's frosted lime eyes searched over Zack's face a moment before following the cobalt gaze out of the room. The expression on the white haired student's face never faultered. Zidane caught on and with a raised eyebrow, followed their attention. A moment of awkward silence hung over the lunch table before Zidane put down his pizza and Zack broke his stare, smiling disdainfully.
The blonde haired techi clicked his tongue and continued to look. "Are you sure you're not straight? Because that deffinitly looks like a spikey haired woman to me. Maybe a little on the flat side, but-"
"And you call yourself a tail chaser," Zack laughed and reached for the crumpled bag of funyuns without noticing himself doing so, only to be blocked by Zik's fist pounding his knuckles into the tabletop. Wincing and wrestling his hand free of the pin, shook his fingers gingerly. "You could be a little less violent."
Zidane shrugged, ignoring the random injury. Over the edge of the tabletop, a furry prehesile tail crept like some sort of trained slug and twitched. "Hey, I got it for a reason," he said with a broad grin.
"You're getting fur near the food," Zik growled dangerously. The tail retreated and Zidane rolled his eyes, returning to his pizza. Green eyes fixing on Zack as the spikey haired student rubbed at his swelling knuckles with a forced expression of nonchalance, Zik reclined his chair to its normal position and pushed back, standing. "And if you don't know, and you won't ask, I will."
A jolt like electricity ran up Zack's spine and stabbed him in the stomach, causing what little he had eaten during lunch recoil in a terriably unpleasent way. He was halfway across the table on his stomach with a hand out trying to catch Zik's sweater as the taller student moved away, but it was too late. "No, Zik-" His arm fell limp as he saw Zik duck to enter the room where the blonde had been sitting. "Damnit."
"As used to your ugly ass self intruding in my personal space," Zidane said, holding his pizza above Zack's midsection which was taking up the area that his tray had occupied until a moment ago, "Can you get out of my eating spot?"
Zack fell limp across the table and recoiled himself slowly into his chair, sliming backwards and slumping in the seat, his head flopped back and staring at the ceiling. "Fuck."