FF8, The Island Closest to Hell's Kitchen
Today is officially the first day of summer, but honestly, I don't consider summer really started until I've seen Fred get in a fight with someone. Which he did last weekend, so! All's well in the world and the seasons may proceed on schedule.
Sometimes I finish writing things that really oughtn't be finished. Usually it is out of sheer spite. There were at least five different icons I could have used for posting this, and that's sort of sad. Anyway, this is a very late present for mewschangeling. Or early, depending on how you look at it.
Title: The Island Closest to Hell’s Kitchen
Summary: God, I don't even know.
Warning & Disclaimer: Sheer and unadulterated stupidity. Italics abuse. All FFVIII characters belong to Square.
Notes: I don't have an excuse for this, except sometimes you get a very stupid idea, and then you have to write it out for fear it will otherwise hang out in your brain for all eternity, smoking up behind the gym and peer-pressuring all the other story ideas into trying to jump the ol' gorge on a skateboard.
Also, I think this was originally intended as a birthday present for Changeling, like, several birthdays ago. Go figure. I’m terribly sorry, Changeling.
"Teamwork," Quistis said, "is of the utmost importance. Despite what you may think, this is a real battlefield. What you are doing is important to your further development on the way to becoming valuable members of SeeD. The results will determine your future as successful members of both GARDEN and SeeD."
Quistis had been talking for the last fifteen minutes and pacing for the last ten, marching back and forth across the small area in short, taut arcs. The room was too hot, and there were too many people crammed into it.
Seifer had tuned out after the first thirty seconds of her speech and retreated into his own thoughts rather the same way he did most things: ostentatiously, sprawlingly, and with a great deal of concentration on how to look his best while doing it. His legs stretched into the aisle and Quistis automatically stepped over them on each turnabout.
"Our client for this mission is the Dollet Dukedom Parliament. We've had a contract with them since six months ago, but they made a request for additional SeeD aid eighteen hours ago."
Final-fucking-ly, Seifer thought vaguely, something that sounded like it was getting to the point.
"As you know, the history between Dollet and Galbadia has been a series of long and complicated battles. Currently, there is a political truce on hold while the daughter of one of the higher-ups in the Dollet Dukedom Parliament is marrying the son of a prominent Galbadian army colonel. The wedding is going to be aired live through the Dollet Communication Tower." She paused. "I believe the color scheme is ivory and peach."
A few seats away, Squall frowned. Was that humor? Sarcasm? He often failed to recognize either emotion unless he was concentrating. This worried him but he tended to forget that it did so, resulting in a perpetual vague agitation during social situations of any kind.
"Forty-nine hours into the security plans, the member of the Dollet Dukedom Parliament who is paying for this affair abandoned his position. Currently, he has retreated into the study of his house and has been communicating with us solely through electronic mail messages. That's the current status of our employers. And so here we are."
She paused. "Life and death, victory and defeat, honor and disgrace... Each of these go hand in hand. There's only one way or the other. Who knows? Maybe Garden will secretly base your performance here on your actual chance for achieving SeeD."
Seifer perked further at the words 'victory' and 'honor' but realized that nothing was still happening. Irritated at being distracted from his carefully cultivated pose, he waited until she was on her turnabout and then flicked a crumpled scrap of paper at her. It missed her but hit the back of Zell's head, which caused him to jerk upwards in his seat and then look around puzzled, so Seifer counted it as an overall win.
"Now, onto the mission objective. SeeD is providing an honor-guard escort and back-up security for the wedding. As training cadets, you will help provide other amenities."
Quistis pushed a strand of hair behind her left ear, crossed her arms over her chest, and pinned the class with a level stare.
"Report to the front of the room in pairs to receive your apron, recipe, and sundry ingredient materials. Knives, mixing bowls, and measuring cups should already be at each station, as well as partner assignments. I trust this Home Economics class will not end in the same fiasco as last month's waltz seminar."
***
"You're not doing it right," Squall said flatly, a few moments in. "The measuring. You're not doing it right."
Seifer paused in mid-scoop and stared at Squall wordlessly. This did not faze Squall in the least.
"What," Seifer finally said, refusing to make it sound like a question. Almasys didn't ask questions. As an orphan, Seifer wasn't entirely sure of what Almasys did, but he was certain that they didn't ask questions.
"It's supposed to be level," Squall insisted. "You're doing heaping cupfuls. It's supposed to be straight across, not rounded."
"Like you know anything about being straight, Puberty Boy," Seifer sneered, pleased that Squall had left such an obvious opening. It was really too easy sometimes, with the only problem being that Squall often didn't seem to recognize the fact he was being insulted. Seifer waited eagerly for a riposte, confident in his ability to volley insults through the whole class and into the next before he had to start dipping into non-sexuality-related retorts.
"Well…" Squall stared intensely at his spatula, his gaze going blank. Long experience (and not even Seifer, who was extremely adept at forgetting anything that didn't interest or reflect him in the best possible light, could ignore this habit of Squall's) told Seifer that Squall was probably in the middle of another long and absorbing soliloquy. Long experience had also caused Seifer to occasionally devote some time, minimal as it was, to wondering what the hell Squall actually was thinking about, since no logical pattern to his decisions had been found thus far, even after particularly lengthy soliloquies of ten minutes and upwards.
Seifer would have probably felt vindicated to know that Squall's mental processes were currently not going through an agonizing self-examination of emotion, a weighing of three options and their outcomes, or even a slightly psychedelic out-of-body flashback, but in fact were trying to remember the theme song to Chocobo Rangers which had been Squall's favorite television show when he was seven.
But he didn't know, and so he settled for reaching over to the cooking station next to theirs and neatly swiping a bottle of cooking sherry to pass the time with while waiting for Squall to snap out of neutral and shift into first gear.
***
Raijin was wearing a pink apron.
Raijin was wearing a pink apron.
Raijin was wearing a pink apron.
Fujin felt the need to point this out, loudly and repeatedly, since Seifer was otherwise occupied with killing his brain cells through cooking sherry.
“RAIJIN,” she said, “APRON. PINK.”
“It’s really more of a light red, ya know?”
“PINK.”
It was undeniably, unmistakably, extremely, violently pink. It was trimmed with lace along the bottom and had heart-shaped buttons on the straps that went over the shoulders. Both straps were also trimmed with lace.
“Everyone’s wearing ‘em,” Raijin said. “You’re wearing one, Fuu, ya know? Have you seen a butcher knife around here?”
“NORMAL.” She ran one hand over her own apron. “BLUE, NO LACE.”
“Mine’s normal!”
“NEGATIVE.”
"I don't see what my apron's got to do with the actual cooking, ya know? And I need a knife to chop the apples but I can’t find mine.”
"DOOFUS."
“D’you think Seifer would cut the apples for me with his gunblade if I asked? Because he did it that one time, when I had the apple on my head and he wanted to practice.”
Seifer glanced up a trifle hazily, hearing his name. “Me?” he said vaguely, “I don’t think anything, really.” Fujin leaned over and kicked him. Seifer shook his head briskly, looked over at them, and frowned. “Is that a pink apron? Why are you wearing a pink apron?”
“SEE?”
“They told us to wear the aprons or we'd get marked down, Seifer! I didn’t have a choice, ya know?”
“NEGATIVE,” Fujin interjected. “CALLED IT.”
“You called the pink apron, Raijin?” Seifer asked scathingly. “You wanted to wear it?”
“I think it’s nice,” Raijin muttered defensively around his breath, fiddling with the hem. “It’s pretty, ya know?”
Fujin gave Raijin a hard look. “DISTURBING.”
“You look very nice, Raijin,” Quistis said kindly, as she was passing by. “Seifer, put your apron on.”
The garment in question was wadded up and partially under Seifer’s left thigh. It was white. It had a frill on the bottom. "Kiss the Cook" was embroidered jauntily across the chest.
Seifer gave Quistis a look full of scorn, disdain, and Best Galbadian cooking sherry.
"I'm not wearing it," he said flatly.
Almasys did not wear aprons. They particularly did not wear aprons that were white, frilly, and had words on them, unless the words were the sort that couldn't be used in polite conversation. Seifer began a furious internal diatribe on appropriate cooking attire in military institutional settings, as well as mentally noting to tell Fujin and Raijin to start working on a campaign plan, since it was clear that GARDEN had ridiculous fashion tastes and the only way he'd be able to do anything about it was to stage a political takeover and become headmaster. There were a few issues that might hinder the path of his road towards political might, such as his current lack of SeeD status, the metric ton of paperwork recording complaints lodged against him, and the fact that any posters Raijin made always relied heavily on glitter and stick figures. But Seifer had great hair and a flawless profile and a lot of underclassmen were terrified of him, which counted for much more in the long run anyway.
But Quistis, while also unfamiliar with Squall’s thought processes, was highly familiar with how Seifer’s mind worked and headed him off before he could open his mouth. “First, you can’t become headmaster if you don’t actually pass the SeeD test and this isn’t even the SeeD test, it’s pre-test, so put it on.”
Fujin, also being familiar with Seifer’s thought processes, already had The List out, and was trying to find room to underline Quistis’s name again. Eventually, she gave up and simply drew a tiny chef’s hat next to Quistis’s name.
“And secondly,” Quistis added as she saw Zell about to turn the blender on without a lid, “you’ll get your coat stained, so-- oh. Oh no.”
She sprinted off towards Zell, leaving Seifer stuck with the dilemma of doing the opposite of what Quistis said just on principle but recognizing her point about his coat. It was a very nice coat. It had presence, elegance, and it always swirled just right when he walked. It was also part of his trademark appearance; taking it off so it wouldn't be splattered wasn't a possibility.
He eventually put the apron on, but only after finding a marker and editing it to read "Kiss the Cook's Ass."
***
"That's it," Quistis encouraged. "There you go. No, turn the beaters off before you take them out of the bowl. That's it. Very good, Zell."
She released a breath she hadn't even realized she had been holding ever since Zell had plugged in the mixer.
Zell beamed. "This is kinda fun, you know? Ma really hasn't let me in the kitchen much since the muffin episode. I mean, we got them off the ceiling eventually but she's never really forgotten it."
At the cooking station across from them, Seifer was inching towards an unguarded bottle of peppermint schnapps. Squall had given up trying to pull memories from his GF-ravaged mind, and was mentally composing a poem about the butcher knife he had taken from Raijin’s station, momentarily stuck on the fact that he could find no word to rhyme with silver.
She was going to have to go back over there. Taking another breath, Quistis mentally steeled herself and walked back towards them.
"And how are things going over here?" Quistis asked brightly. The responses were various.
"FINE."
"Sorta slow, ya know?"
"…whatever."
"…"
Seifer's sneer and eyeroll were not quite audible yet, but fruition would come after a few more years of practice.
Quistis looked over at Raijin and frowned. "You know, a gunblade is not a recommended instrument for coring apples, nor is it particularly… er, sanitary. I'm going to have to take points away."
Upon hearing this, Fujin and Seifer simultaneously rounded on Raijin and screeched at him in identical registers from both sides.
"STUPID! ASSIGNMENT, FLUNK!"
"My gunblade! I just upgraded it!"
"DIRECTIONS, FOLLOW!"
"And you were holding it all wrong! It's a one-handed grip and force from that angle could ruin the blade!"
"CHUNKS, NEGATIVE! MINCING, REQUIRED!"
"You can't use a gunblade on apples! They're an inferior life-form!" He snatched it from Raijin's hands. "My gunblade drinks blood and terror!"
"RAGE!"
"Haven't you ever listened to a single thing I've ever told you about weapon maintenance?! You just can't use a gunblade like that! It... it...! Debases it! It demeans it! It disgraces it! It d-d- d-...!" Seifer briefly sputtered himself into incoherence.
"Dishonor?" Raijin said timidly, peeking out from behind his baking sheet.
"DEGRADE," Fujin suggested.
Seifer considered both and actually liked Raijin's word better, as it appealed to his romantic nature, but since Raijin was in disgrace and the reason for his incoherence in the first place, he went with Fujin's suggestion.
"Completely, utterly, totally degrades it!"
He waggled his gunblade threateningly for good measure. Bits of apple splattered on the floor.
If he'd had the presence of mind, Raijin might have pointed out that Seifer was often observed using his gunblade for tasks in the same vein, such as changing the channel on television, getting things down from high shelves, shaving (when he was drunk), and as a microphone for singing bad karaoke (when he was drunker.) Surprisingly, he cut himself much less performing the former than he did the latter.
When it came to someone else performing inappropriate tasks with his gunblade, Seifer objected far less to the inappropriate tasks as he did to the fact that it was someone else performing them. Growing up as an orphan had cultivated certain possessive instincts. Also, he had drunk two other station's worthy of sherry by then.
And while he didn't have the presence of mind to voice such opinions, Raijin had also cultivated certain instincts from growing up with Seifer and Fujin, and simply cowered appropriately.
***
"Sonuva--!"
Zell swore as yet another broken egg yolk slid through his fingers in gooey yellow ribbons, impossible to catch before it fell into the bowl of already separated egg whites. The two egg yolks he had managed to save unbroken in another bowl just sat there, like two unblinking yellow eyes. Beyond them were the broken shells of the eight other eggs he had ruined. He only had one left.
"Delicate touch, Zell," Quistis said distractedly as she hurried past him. "You've got so much experience working with your hands. Think of it as one of your combat drills without gloves."
"Usually I'm trying to break stuff while I'm drilling," he complained, but Quistis only gave him an absent pat on the shoulder as she brushed by, her gaze fixed on a cadet who looked like he had gotten his tongue stuck in an eggbeater.
He sighed and looked at the last egg, sitting alone in the empty carton. "You and me, pal," he muttered, and picked it up gingerly. "Let's go."
Taking a deep breath, Zell held the egg between his thumb and forefinger. Delicate touch. Just like a drill. He hesitated, took another breath, and rapped it against the edge of the bowl. He squinted at the spider web of tiny cracks-- not quite hard enough. Biting his lip, he gave it a harder tap and was rewarded with the crunching give of the shell's collapse.
Hurriedly, he stuck his fingernails into the dent of the broken area and pried the two halves of the shell apart as carefully as he could. Quistis had said that he couldn't let even a single shard of the shell fall into the batter. She hadn't said why, but Zell thought he could piece that together on his own. Because what if the Prime Minister of Somewhere Important ate that bite and got a piece of eggshell in his mouth, and was so disgusted that he spat it on the lapels of the Mayor of So and So, and the mayor got upset and ended up calling a missile strike on Somewhere Important, and the Prime Minster would send a missile strike back, and then the Duke of Wherever got involved? And it would be his entire fault.
And even if that meant SeeD would probably get a lot more contracts, Zell wasn't quite ready to be responsible for nuclear genocide because he couldn't separate a single egg. Ma would never be able to show her face in town again.
He poured the yolk back and forth between the shells, careful not to let it get pierced. He could barely breathe. Finally, every last drop of the white was out and he could put the yolk in with the other two yolks. Exhaling in one gusty sigh, he wiped the sweat off his forehead with an oven mitt.
Quistis hurried by again, glancing at his work. "Excellent, Zell," she said. "Now, get the sugar ready and mix it with the big spoon. Watch Squall, he's doing the same kind of thing. I'll be back to help you in just a minute. I think there's been an accident with a grater."
Across the room, a girl was shrieking and there was an impressive amount of blood. Quistis was not-quite running, and Zell could already see her fumbling for a potion.
Zell sighed. His ma had always made cooking look so easy. He wondered what the secret was. Even Squall looked like he was concentrating hard, brows drawn together in a frown as he stared into his bowl and stirred with mechanical precision. He watched Squall, a little wistfully. Squall probably had every step of the recipe memorized already, and was reciting it in ancient Centran.
Zell wished he could focus that intently.
***
I don't know why they call it cheesecake. It looks more like a pie, all flat. Cheese pie. I guess that doesn't roll off the tongue as easily as cheesecake. Doesn't that have to do with those rules about similar vowel sounds? Retaliation? Alienation? Alliteration? Yeah, that's it, that's the one. But they're not even the same sounds. One has an h-sound attached to the c, the other sounds more like a k. Maybe it's because pies usually have crusts on them. Although cheesecakes have crusts, just not over the top. In fact, not all pies have crusts that go over the top. There was that pie in the cafeteria last Wednesday around lunchtime, and that didn't have a crust on it. What kind of pie was it? Did I have some of it or do I just remember looking at it? I think there were apples in it. But apple pies usually have a crust over the top, so maybe not.
Did I even eat lunch last Wednesday?
I wonder why the cafeteria never has any hotdogs. You'd think they'd figure out that they should cook more. Maybe they're trying to build up supply and demand. But we have a meal-plan system and we're not paying for the food individually, so that doesn't make sense. Maybe there's a hot dog plot afoot. I wonder why plots are always afoot. Not everything has feet. Hot dogs don't have feet. According to the cafeteria, anyway. Maybe it's true about what they say. Maybe they really do grind up all the leftover training center monsters at the end of each season rotation when they stock new types, and funnel them into sausage skins. Maybe we've been eating gratdogs. Would that count as vegetarian?
Do grats have feelings? Do carrots mind being eaten? Grats make that weird noise when they die, but do they have nerve endings? I don't see why some vegetarians won't eat products from animals that aren't necessarily meat. It isn't always hurting them. I guess I can understand eggs because they're just like pre-chicken chickens, but that's not the same as milk. Milk doesn't turn into cows. Not technically. If a cow doesn't get milked, wouldn't that be cruel to the cow? Wouldn’t the vegetarian then be the bad person? All over some milk. And the milk can be used for a lot of things, including cheese. There's bacteria in cheese. Maybe that's why some vegetarians don't like it. They're killing bacteria. But we do that just by breathing, let alone eating cheese.
I don't know why they call it cheesecake. It really does look more like a pie. Pies are flat and cakes aren't, unless they're fallen cakes, and in that case they aren't good anymore. Although there are some flat cakes. Like pancakes. But those aren't the same thing at all. They're not even really cake. Don't they call them flapjacks in Dollet?
Why's it so quiet? Why is Zell staring at me? Shit, everyone's looking at me. Is there something on my face? Am I supposed to be answering a question? Better say something.
"...whatever."
***
By the time he had worked out that Headmaster Cid had probably never passed a SeeD test to attain his position, it scarcely mattered because Seifer had escalated from plans to get a political chokehold on the Balamb GARDEN system to plans to get a political double underhook suplex on the entire Balamb continent so that he could outlaw pie from ever being served on the island again. Or at least, outlaw any defective pie dough from ever being manufactured again.
“You should add some flour to the rolling pin,” Squall observed from behind him. “Otherwise the dough will keep sticking to it.”
“Your head will be sticking to it if you don’t piss off,” Seifer snarled, and rolled harder. When Squall turned away, he grabbed a scoop of flour and threw it at the dough, sneezing when it billowed in his face unexpectedly.
“Did you just sneeze on the dough?”
“Yes.”
Squall shrugged, and went back to whisking while staring at the wall. The cream in his bowl had long since passed the state of whipped and was well on its way to being brutalized.
Seifer sneezed again deliberately, hacked a couple times for good measure, and returned to bending the dough to his will. Perhaps it wasn’t the dough that was defective at all. Perhaps it was the rolling pin. He discarded it and looked around for a better instrument with which to express his dominance.
Sometime after Squall had realized that his whipped cream had become butter-again-he found Seifer carefully cutting a firecross symbol in the top of the pastry dough. He looked closer and frowned.
“Did you use a meat hammer to flatten the dough?”
“None of your goddamn business.”
“It doesn’t look right.”
“It’s fine.”
“The dough doesn’t cover the pie all the way.”
"I'll cover you," Seifer growled under his breath and gripped the meat hammer tighter.
Squall stared at him. "That doesn't even make sense," he said.
Where Squall's more unfortunate decisions could be blamed on hormones, apathy, and overlong mental soliloquies, Seifer's decisions were (while occasionally hormonal) mostly rooted in sheer bastard nature. And yet, contrary to popular opinion, Seifer had startlingly similar thought patterns to Squall.
His just tended to resolve themselves rather more quickly.
A very small portion of his brain wailed out that he must not do this, but Seifer had always been skilled at ignoring that voice. He took a good look at their pie, which was actually beginning to look like it might one day be edible.
Seifer mentally said a brief goodbye to another chance for making SeeD, picked up the pie, and shoved it squarely into Squall's face.
***
GARDEN did not pay overtime.
This was a regrettable fact, because if it had, Quistis would have been independently rich by the time she was seventeen. At nineteen, she probably would have been able to buy her own airship fleet. And at twenty-one, she could have comfortably retired with her own private island and formed a small independent nation, somewhere far away where any use of the words "Garden" and "SeeD" were still strictly botanical.
However, GARDEN did not pay overtime.
The official explanation was that unmonitored SeeD teams on away missions could too easily abuse the payroll. Or, Quistis thought, they had somehow seen into the future for this very day and realized that they would have to immediately start stockpiling their gil in order to cover the potential damage costs. Either way, she was going to have to perform far above and beyond her usual line of duty, with the knowledge that she'd still only be making normal wage. Days like these made her occasionally wonder what it would have been like to have gone AWOL on her first SeeD test, disappearing into the Trabian wilderness and having to live entirely apart from any sort of human civilization.
Zell rolled by her feet, involved in some sort of wrestling match with Raijin. Fujin followed closely behind, kicking at the fighting pair and not seeming to mind particularly if her foot hit Zell or Raijin. She did, however, still seem to be supporting Raijin. There was a lot more of Raijin to kick; that she seemed to be hitting both at an equal rate spoke of some effort to avoid her partner.
At the moment, Trabian snowfields did not seem like entirely unreasonable places to be. At least they would be quiet. And snowlions never broke into cleaver-wielding melees.
"Right," Quistis said mildly. "Right."
Squall came skidding across the countertop, directly towards her. She took a small step to the side, letting him crash off one end, and looked closer at the countertop, running one finger in the shiny trail left behind. Sniffed. Vegetable oil. She looked over the counter, where Squall was having some amount of trouble getting to his feet. Yes, he was quite soaked in it. There was also whipped cream in his hair.
A small part of Quistis's mind told her that in other circumstances, she might enjoy the view.
Seifer suddenly loomed before her, also soaked in-- was that molasses? Whatever it was seemed to be sticky; there was a teaspoon and three measuring cups of different sizes clinging gummily to his back. He dove over the counter at Squall-- really, Quistis thought, he was ridiculously over-dramatic; he could have just as easily taken two steps to the left and gone around the counter, and he wouldn't have gotten vegetable oil on himself-- and knocked Zell's mixing bowl off the counter in the same motion. Quistis jerked aside, and the bowl missed her by an inch.
On the floor, Seifer tried to grab Squall and knock his head against the oven, but Squall slipped out of his grip-- on purpose or just because of the oil, Quistis wasn't sure-- and kicked him in the sternum. His foot stuck briefly to Seifer's chest, and only came away with a lot of tugging. They flailed together for a moment, neither of them able to move well, and settled for scrabbling on the floor and hitting each other with whatever came to hand.
Quistis blinked. She hoped vaguely that by doing so, the world would somehow change and she wouldn't be watching Seifer try to stick an eggbeater up Squall's nose. No, still the same.
She put two fingers to her forehead and rubbed. The batter in Zell's bowl had splattered her glasses. She took them off, careful to grip them by the stems instead of the lenses, and ran them under the water faucet. There was a tea-towel hanging on the cabinet to her left, and she used the cleanest corner to dry her glasses before firmly replacing them levelly on the bridge of her nose. Then, she took them off again and stowed them safely in her pocket.
“I’m going to kill Seifer,” Quistis said to no one in particular. This would make her (not including any direct participants in the Galbadian-Balamb invasion) the one hundred and seventeenth person out of the seven hundred and forty nine people who would eventually have that exact resolution at some time in their lives.
Her hand dropped to the whip at her waist.
***
Across the room and amid the chaos, Nida was encapsulated in his own small space of tranquility, as he continued tiptoeing towards his oven with extreme care. He was running perfectly along schedule, but it never hurt to be cautious. Only the most dedicated cadets would make SeeD and he saw no point in taking chances.
Besides, he'd always rather liked cooking.
Scarcely daring to breath, he eased the oven door open just the barest sliver, just enough to see how things were progressing. Heat and the warm fragrance of chocolate billowed out against his face; he didn't even need to glance at the glossy pages of his cookbook to know that everything was just as it should be. The pans in the oven each had a mellow gleam under the motion-activated sensor light. Perfect.
Seifer was flung across the room, courtesy of a perfectly-executed flying mare by Squall, and hit the wall next to Nida with a room-shuddering thud.
The tops of all four rounds of his excruciatingly lovely, scrupulously assembled, light as a feather, quadruple chocolate layer cake collapsed simultaneously.
Even its death was a masterpiece, the way it gracefully settled into ruin with four simultaneous sighs of escaping air, like wistful breaths released upon realizing the loss of a glorious future in the center of a dessert table in Dollet. There was dignity to the way it diminished; even the heat shimmers over the pans seemed to pause in respect for the passing. The only thing that remained unchanged was the smell of the chocolate, a thick, sweet elegy that swelled out of the oven and into the rest of the room.
Nearby, Seifer leaped to his feet, threw a double handful of the intricately molded marzipan figures Nida had created of the Dollet cabinet as decoration for his cake, snatched a carving knife, and dashed back into the fray.
Nida sat heavily down on the floor, still wearing his oven mitts. His grade could be salvaged, he thought. He could probably scrounge the nineteen essential ingredients from the various workstations. There were only twenty steps involved. Three extra hours of cooking weren't that long. It would be nothing at all for an ambitious SeeD applicant and the faster he got on it, the better.
The sound of the oven door shutting was like the final snap of a T-Rexuar's jaws closing on an unwary cadet.
"Now it's on," he breathed, and grabbed his own carving knife.
***
The results of the next twenty-three minutes resulted in the second largest ever mass-detention assignment given by the Disciplinary Committee and accompanying SeeD in the history of Balamb Garden.
Few were brave or stupid enough to point out the irony that if the Disciplinary Committee itself had been included in this assignment, it would have taken the record. The record still belonged to another memorable occasion: one month earlier, February 13, the infamous waltz seminar that degenerated into an all-out brawl between SeeD and SeeD candidates, which caused eight hundred thousand gil worth of damage and enough serious injuries to actually deplete the infirmary of hi-potions. Speculators had gossiped that the brawl originated over disagreements over who would lead-- hardly avoidable when the seminar leaders had realized there was a shortage of female SeeD to help teach, and resorted to matching up cadets regardless of height or gender.
Curiously enough, the Disciplinary Committee had also been present at this seminar but its members were not included in that resulting detention assignment either.
***
Xu had heard the news and came as soon as she could.
"Where's Cid?" She looked around. "And what happened to all the cooking sherry?"
"The headmaster is in his office going over the expense forms for the damage and smoothing things over with the Dolletian wedding caterers," Quistis said. "I think the cooking sherry is helping him."
"Ah."
"What little Seifer left, anyway."
"Ah."
Xu infused the single syllable with all the not inconsiderable experience that having helped teach the waltz seminar a month earlier had given her. She had also already clocked in as the ninety sixth person out of the seven hundred and forty nine people who would at some point have designs on Seifer's life.
"I told you to pretend to have some sort of debilitating disease in order to get out of doing this. I told you."
"I know," Quistis said forlornly, "but there was no one else and I don't think anything short of leprosy would have gotten me out of it. Besides, you didn't fake a broken leg for the waltz seminar like you said you were going to."
"I should have," Xu muttered darkly. "I'm surprised I have toes left at all. Not to mention Almasy refusing to put his gunblade down while dancing and nearly taking off Dincht's head on the pivot. Accident, my ass."
"I have half a box of powdered sugar on my skirt, egg on my boots, I think some pecans went down my blouse, and there's icing in my hair, Xu." Quistis closed her eyes wearily. "Please tell me that I can use your shower, because mine's broken and I don't want to use the commons."
Xu made proper sympathetic noises. "You can use mine, but I think it'll take the hot water a while to come back, if the amount of people I saw going into the dormitory commons have anything to do with it."
"Just my luck," Quistis said. She reached around without opening her eyes, raised her hand, and made a swift movement. Xu moved back hastily, but still caught a palm full of icing to her left cheek. Quistis opened her eyes in accusation. "You should have suffered here with me."
Xu gave Quistis a long look, reached out with one finger, and swiped a bit of icing off Quistis's temple and examined it. She smiled. "Well, we don't necessarily need the showers right away, do we?" She licked her finger. "Mm, buttercream."
"Sticking one's fingers in food for testing isn't hygienic, and will result in point detention," Quistis said primly, but smiled back. "Come on, I think there might be a bottle of Amaretto that Seifer missed."
***
"The important thing is," Seifer explained, "that we won."
"Right!" Raijin said, still anxious to stay on Seifer's good side. "Flawless victory, ya know?"
"OWNED," Fujin agreed.
"Although I don't know how I'm going to get all this crap off Hyperion," Seifer grumbled. "I don't know if the cleaner I usually use can handle it. Can you believe this? My baby's all sticky and--" he shuddered-- "dinged."
There was a companionable silence for a few moments, broken only by the gummy clicks of a gunblade clogged with pure Timber maple syrup.
"So, um." Raijin bit his lip. "How much longer do ya think we'll have to hide out in this tree? Because every time the T-Rexaur comes by, I think it's getting hungrier."
Beneath the training center tree, the T-Rexaur paced, sniffed the air, and occasionally roared.
Seifer gave Raijin the most scornful look he could present under the circumstances, managing to look as he were lounging about and waiting for the president of Esthar to present him with a personal commendation, instead of sitting uncomfortably astride a tree branch that was only a few feet above a large and hungry reptile. It was a skill of Seifer's that very few GARDEN inhabitants had also mastered, and that many envied.
"We're not hiding, Raijin. We're just practicing a strategic tactical removal from the premises."
"HOW LONG?" Fujin demanded.
"At least until they make someone else clean up the kitchen area," Seifer said decisively.
The T-Rexaur let out another frustrated roar and finally stomped off, tailing swinging and nostrils flaring for the last hint of chocolate soufflé a la coated SeeD Candidate. When it had disappeared into the underbrush, Seifer straightened up and started down the tree.
"Let's go be strategic in a place with alcohol. And I bet the Chicken-Wuss is still in the showers. We can flush all the toilets at the same time and scald him."
***
Later that evening, Squall sat in his corner of the detention room. It wasn't exactly a private place, but he had learned not to let that bother him anymore. It was good to have friends, good to at least be incarcerated with those you could depend on, those who would listen and demand nothing, giving no judgement. He didn't know how he could have survived all these years at Garden were it not for his discovery of who to go to in every emotional crisis.
He turned his back on the room, faced the soothingly blank surface of the wall, and started to talk.
"I woke up this morning and I already knew it was going to be a bad day, because I tripped over my gunblade and banged my shin, and I had a song stuck in my head that I couldn't remember the name of, and then the cafeteria was out of orange juice..."
***
The end. Thank the lord.
Sometimes I finish writing things that really oughtn't be finished. Usually it is out of sheer spite. There were at least five different icons I could have used for posting this, and that's sort of sad. Anyway, this is a very late present for mewschangeling. Or early, depending on how you look at it.
Title: The Island Closest to Hell’s Kitchen
Summary: God, I don't even know.
Warning & Disclaimer: Sheer and unadulterated stupidity. Italics abuse. All FFVIII characters belong to Square.
Notes: I don't have an excuse for this, except sometimes you get a very stupid idea, and then you have to write it out for fear it will otherwise hang out in your brain for all eternity, smoking up behind the gym and peer-pressuring all the other story ideas into trying to jump the ol' gorge on a skateboard.
Also, I think this was originally intended as a birthday present for Changeling, like, several birthdays ago. Go figure. I’m terribly sorry, Changeling.
"Teamwork," Quistis said, "is of the utmost importance. Despite what you may think, this is a real battlefield. What you are doing is important to your further development on the way to becoming valuable members of SeeD. The results will determine your future as successful members of both GARDEN and SeeD."
Quistis had been talking for the last fifteen minutes and pacing for the last ten, marching back and forth across the small area in short, taut arcs. The room was too hot, and there were too many people crammed into it.
Seifer had tuned out after the first thirty seconds of her speech and retreated into his own thoughts rather the same way he did most things: ostentatiously, sprawlingly, and with a great deal of concentration on how to look his best while doing it. His legs stretched into the aisle and Quistis automatically stepped over them on each turnabout.
"Our client for this mission is the Dollet Dukedom Parliament. We've had a contract with them since six months ago, but they made a request for additional SeeD aid eighteen hours ago."
Final-fucking-ly, Seifer thought vaguely, something that sounded like it was getting to the point.
"As you know, the history between Dollet and Galbadia has been a series of long and complicated battles. Currently, there is a political truce on hold while the daughter of one of the higher-ups in the Dollet Dukedom Parliament is marrying the son of a prominent Galbadian army colonel. The wedding is going to be aired live through the Dollet Communication Tower." She paused. "I believe the color scheme is ivory and peach."
A few seats away, Squall frowned. Was that humor? Sarcasm? He often failed to recognize either emotion unless he was concentrating. This worried him but he tended to forget that it did so, resulting in a perpetual vague agitation during social situations of any kind.
"Forty-nine hours into the security plans, the member of the Dollet Dukedom Parliament who is paying for this affair abandoned his position. Currently, he has retreated into the study of his house and has been communicating with us solely through electronic mail messages. That's the current status of our employers. And so here we are."
She paused. "Life and death, victory and defeat, honor and disgrace... Each of these go hand in hand. There's only one way or the other. Who knows? Maybe Garden will secretly base your performance here on your actual chance for achieving SeeD."
Seifer perked further at the words 'victory' and 'honor' but realized that nothing was still happening. Irritated at being distracted from his carefully cultivated pose, he waited until she was on her turnabout and then flicked a crumpled scrap of paper at her. It missed her but hit the back of Zell's head, which caused him to jerk upwards in his seat and then look around puzzled, so Seifer counted it as an overall win.
"Now, onto the mission objective. SeeD is providing an honor-guard escort and back-up security for the wedding. As training cadets, you will help provide other amenities."
Quistis pushed a strand of hair behind her left ear, crossed her arms over her chest, and pinned the class with a level stare.
"Report to the front of the room in pairs to receive your apron, recipe, and sundry ingredient materials. Knives, mixing bowls, and measuring cups should already be at each station, as well as partner assignments. I trust this Home Economics class will not end in the same fiasco as last month's waltz seminar."
***
"You're not doing it right," Squall said flatly, a few moments in. "The measuring. You're not doing it right."
Seifer paused in mid-scoop and stared at Squall wordlessly. This did not faze Squall in the least.
"What," Seifer finally said, refusing to make it sound like a question. Almasys didn't ask questions. As an orphan, Seifer wasn't entirely sure of what Almasys did, but he was certain that they didn't ask questions.
"It's supposed to be level," Squall insisted. "You're doing heaping cupfuls. It's supposed to be straight across, not rounded."
"Like you know anything about being straight, Puberty Boy," Seifer sneered, pleased that Squall had left such an obvious opening. It was really too easy sometimes, with the only problem being that Squall often didn't seem to recognize the fact he was being insulted. Seifer waited eagerly for a riposte, confident in his ability to volley insults through the whole class and into the next before he had to start dipping into non-sexuality-related retorts.
"Well…" Squall stared intensely at his spatula, his gaze going blank. Long experience (and not even Seifer, who was extremely adept at forgetting anything that didn't interest or reflect him in the best possible light, could ignore this habit of Squall's) told Seifer that Squall was probably in the middle of another long and absorbing soliloquy. Long experience had also caused Seifer to occasionally devote some time, minimal as it was, to wondering what the hell Squall actually was thinking about, since no logical pattern to his decisions had been found thus far, even after particularly lengthy soliloquies of ten minutes and upwards.
Seifer would have probably felt vindicated to know that Squall's mental processes were currently not going through an agonizing self-examination of emotion, a weighing of three options and their outcomes, or even a slightly psychedelic out-of-body flashback, but in fact were trying to remember the theme song to Chocobo Rangers which had been Squall's favorite television show when he was seven.
But he didn't know, and so he settled for reaching over to the cooking station next to theirs and neatly swiping a bottle of cooking sherry to pass the time with while waiting for Squall to snap out of neutral and shift into first gear.
***
Raijin was wearing a pink apron.
Raijin was wearing a pink apron.
Raijin was wearing a pink apron.
Fujin felt the need to point this out, loudly and repeatedly, since Seifer was otherwise occupied with killing his brain cells through cooking sherry.
“RAIJIN,” she said, “APRON. PINK.”
“It’s really more of a light red, ya know?”
“PINK.”
It was undeniably, unmistakably, extremely, violently pink. It was trimmed with lace along the bottom and had heart-shaped buttons on the straps that went over the shoulders. Both straps were also trimmed with lace.
“Everyone’s wearing ‘em,” Raijin said. “You’re wearing one, Fuu, ya know? Have you seen a butcher knife around here?”
“NORMAL.” She ran one hand over her own apron. “BLUE, NO LACE.”
“Mine’s normal!”
“NEGATIVE.”
"I don't see what my apron's got to do with the actual cooking, ya know? And I need a knife to chop the apples but I can’t find mine.”
"DOOFUS."
“D’you think Seifer would cut the apples for me with his gunblade if I asked? Because he did it that one time, when I had the apple on my head and he wanted to practice.”
Seifer glanced up a trifle hazily, hearing his name. “Me?” he said vaguely, “I don’t think anything, really.” Fujin leaned over and kicked him. Seifer shook his head briskly, looked over at them, and frowned. “Is that a pink apron? Why are you wearing a pink apron?”
“SEE?”
“They told us to wear the aprons or we'd get marked down, Seifer! I didn’t have a choice, ya know?”
“NEGATIVE,” Fujin interjected. “CALLED IT.”
“You called the pink apron, Raijin?” Seifer asked scathingly. “You wanted to wear it?”
“I think it’s nice,” Raijin muttered defensively around his breath, fiddling with the hem. “It’s pretty, ya know?”
Fujin gave Raijin a hard look. “DISTURBING.”
“You look very nice, Raijin,” Quistis said kindly, as she was passing by. “Seifer, put your apron on.”
The garment in question was wadded up and partially under Seifer’s left thigh. It was white. It had a frill on the bottom. "Kiss the Cook" was embroidered jauntily across the chest.
Seifer gave Quistis a look full of scorn, disdain, and Best Galbadian cooking sherry.
"I'm not wearing it," he said flatly.
Almasys did not wear aprons. They particularly did not wear aprons that were white, frilly, and had words on them, unless the words were the sort that couldn't be used in polite conversation. Seifer began a furious internal diatribe on appropriate cooking attire in military institutional settings, as well as mentally noting to tell Fujin and Raijin to start working on a campaign plan, since it was clear that GARDEN had ridiculous fashion tastes and the only way he'd be able to do anything about it was to stage a political takeover and become headmaster. There were a few issues that might hinder the path of his road towards political might, such as his current lack of SeeD status, the metric ton of paperwork recording complaints lodged against him, and the fact that any posters Raijin made always relied heavily on glitter and stick figures. But Seifer had great hair and a flawless profile and a lot of underclassmen were terrified of him, which counted for much more in the long run anyway.
But Quistis, while also unfamiliar with Squall’s thought processes, was highly familiar with how Seifer’s mind worked and headed him off before he could open his mouth. “First, you can’t become headmaster if you don’t actually pass the SeeD test and this isn’t even the SeeD test, it’s pre-test, so put it on.”
Fujin, also being familiar with Seifer’s thought processes, already had The List out, and was trying to find room to underline Quistis’s name again. Eventually, she gave up and simply drew a tiny chef’s hat next to Quistis’s name.
“And secondly,” Quistis added as she saw Zell about to turn the blender on without a lid, “you’ll get your coat stained, so-- oh. Oh no.”
She sprinted off towards Zell, leaving Seifer stuck with the dilemma of doing the opposite of what Quistis said just on principle but recognizing her point about his coat. It was a very nice coat. It had presence, elegance, and it always swirled just right when he walked. It was also part of his trademark appearance; taking it off so it wouldn't be splattered wasn't a possibility.
He eventually put the apron on, but only after finding a marker and editing it to read "Kiss the Cook's Ass."
***
"That's it," Quistis encouraged. "There you go. No, turn the beaters off before you take them out of the bowl. That's it. Very good, Zell."
She released a breath she hadn't even realized she had been holding ever since Zell had plugged in the mixer.
Zell beamed. "This is kinda fun, you know? Ma really hasn't let me in the kitchen much since the muffin episode. I mean, we got them off the ceiling eventually but she's never really forgotten it."
At the cooking station across from them, Seifer was inching towards an unguarded bottle of peppermint schnapps. Squall had given up trying to pull memories from his GF-ravaged mind, and was mentally composing a poem about the butcher knife he had taken from Raijin’s station, momentarily stuck on the fact that he could find no word to rhyme with silver.
She was going to have to go back over there. Taking another breath, Quistis mentally steeled herself and walked back towards them.
"And how are things going over here?" Quistis asked brightly. The responses were various.
"FINE."
"Sorta slow, ya know?"
"…whatever."
"…"
Seifer's sneer and eyeroll were not quite audible yet, but fruition would come after a few more years of practice.
Quistis looked over at Raijin and frowned. "You know, a gunblade is not a recommended instrument for coring apples, nor is it particularly… er, sanitary. I'm going to have to take points away."
Upon hearing this, Fujin and Seifer simultaneously rounded on Raijin and screeched at him in identical registers from both sides.
"STUPID! ASSIGNMENT, FLUNK!"
"My gunblade! I just upgraded it!"
"DIRECTIONS, FOLLOW!"
"And you were holding it all wrong! It's a one-handed grip and force from that angle could ruin the blade!"
"CHUNKS, NEGATIVE! MINCING, REQUIRED!"
"You can't use a gunblade on apples! They're an inferior life-form!" He snatched it from Raijin's hands. "My gunblade drinks blood and terror!"
"RAGE!"
"Haven't you ever listened to a single thing I've ever told you about weapon maintenance?! You just can't use a gunblade like that! It... it...! Debases it! It demeans it! It disgraces it! It d-d- d-...!" Seifer briefly sputtered himself into incoherence.
"Dishonor?" Raijin said timidly, peeking out from behind his baking sheet.
"DEGRADE," Fujin suggested.
Seifer considered both and actually liked Raijin's word better, as it appealed to his romantic nature, but since Raijin was in disgrace and the reason for his incoherence in the first place, he went with Fujin's suggestion.
"Completely, utterly, totally degrades it!"
He waggled his gunblade threateningly for good measure. Bits of apple splattered on the floor.
If he'd had the presence of mind, Raijin might have pointed out that Seifer was often observed using his gunblade for tasks in the same vein, such as changing the channel on television, getting things down from high shelves, shaving (when he was drunk), and as a microphone for singing bad karaoke (when he was drunker.) Surprisingly, he cut himself much less performing the former than he did the latter.
When it came to someone else performing inappropriate tasks with his gunblade, Seifer objected far less to the inappropriate tasks as he did to the fact that it was someone else performing them. Growing up as an orphan had cultivated certain possessive instincts. Also, he had drunk two other station's worthy of sherry by then.
And while he didn't have the presence of mind to voice such opinions, Raijin had also cultivated certain instincts from growing up with Seifer and Fujin, and simply cowered appropriately.
***
"Sonuva--!"
Zell swore as yet another broken egg yolk slid through his fingers in gooey yellow ribbons, impossible to catch before it fell into the bowl of already separated egg whites. The two egg yolks he had managed to save unbroken in another bowl just sat there, like two unblinking yellow eyes. Beyond them were the broken shells of the eight other eggs he had ruined. He only had one left.
"Delicate touch, Zell," Quistis said distractedly as she hurried past him. "You've got so much experience working with your hands. Think of it as one of your combat drills without gloves."
"Usually I'm trying to break stuff while I'm drilling," he complained, but Quistis only gave him an absent pat on the shoulder as she brushed by, her gaze fixed on a cadet who looked like he had gotten his tongue stuck in an eggbeater.
He sighed and looked at the last egg, sitting alone in the empty carton. "You and me, pal," he muttered, and picked it up gingerly. "Let's go."
Taking a deep breath, Zell held the egg between his thumb and forefinger. Delicate touch. Just like a drill. He hesitated, took another breath, and rapped it against the edge of the bowl. He squinted at the spider web of tiny cracks-- not quite hard enough. Biting his lip, he gave it a harder tap and was rewarded with the crunching give of the shell's collapse.
Hurriedly, he stuck his fingernails into the dent of the broken area and pried the two halves of the shell apart as carefully as he could. Quistis had said that he couldn't let even a single shard of the shell fall into the batter. She hadn't said why, but Zell thought he could piece that together on his own. Because what if the Prime Minister of Somewhere Important ate that bite and got a piece of eggshell in his mouth, and was so disgusted that he spat it on the lapels of the Mayor of So and So, and the mayor got upset and ended up calling a missile strike on Somewhere Important, and the Prime Minster would send a missile strike back, and then the Duke of Wherever got involved? And it would be his entire fault.
And even if that meant SeeD would probably get a lot more contracts, Zell wasn't quite ready to be responsible for nuclear genocide because he couldn't separate a single egg. Ma would never be able to show her face in town again.
He poured the yolk back and forth between the shells, careful not to let it get pierced. He could barely breathe. Finally, every last drop of the white was out and he could put the yolk in with the other two yolks. Exhaling in one gusty sigh, he wiped the sweat off his forehead with an oven mitt.
Quistis hurried by again, glancing at his work. "Excellent, Zell," she said. "Now, get the sugar ready and mix it with the big spoon. Watch Squall, he's doing the same kind of thing. I'll be back to help you in just a minute. I think there's been an accident with a grater."
Across the room, a girl was shrieking and there was an impressive amount of blood. Quistis was not-quite running, and Zell could already see her fumbling for a potion.
Zell sighed. His ma had always made cooking look so easy. He wondered what the secret was. Even Squall looked like he was concentrating hard, brows drawn together in a frown as he stared into his bowl and stirred with mechanical precision. He watched Squall, a little wistfully. Squall probably had every step of the recipe memorized already, and was reciting it in ancient Centran.
Zell wished he could focus that intently.
***
I don't know why they call it cheesecake. It looks more like a pie, all flat. Cheese pie. I guess that doesn't roll off the tongue as easily as cheesecake. Doesn't that have to do with those rules about similar vowel sounds? Retaliation? Alienation? Alliteration? Yeah, that's it, that's the one. But they're not even the same sounds. One has an h-sound attached to the c, the other sounds more like a k. Maybe it's because pies usually have crusts on them. Although cheesecakes have crusts, just not over the top. In fact, not all pies have crusts that go over the top. There was that pie in the cafeteria last Wednesday around lunchtime, and that didn't have a crust on it. What kind of pie was it? Did I have some of it or do I just remember looking at it? I think there were apples in it. But apple pies usually have a crust over the top, so maybe not.
Did I even eat lunch last Wednesday?
I wonder why the cafeteria never has any hotdogs. You'd think they'd figure out that they should cook more. Maybe they're trying to build up supply and demand. But we have a meal-plan system and we're not paying for the food individually, so that doesn't make sense. Maybe there's a hot dog plot afoot. I wonder why plots are always afoot. Not everything has feet. Hot dogs don't have feet. According to the cafeteria, anyway. Maybe it's true about what they say. Maybe they really do grind up all the leftover training center monsters at the end of each season rotation when they stock new types, and funnel them into sausage skins. Maybe we've been eating gratdogs. Would that count as vegetarian?
Do grats have feelings? Do carrots mind being eaten? Grats make that weird noise when they die, but do they have nerve endings? I don't see why some vegetarians won't eat products from animals that aren't necessarily meat. It isn't always hurting them. I guess I can understand eggs because they're just like pre-chicken chickens, but that's not the same as milk. Milk doesn't turn into cows. Not technically. If a cow doesn't get milked, wouldn't that be cruel to the cow? Wouldn’t the vegetarian then be the bad person? All over some milk. And the milk can be used for a lot of things, including cheese. There's bacteria in cheese. Maybe that's why some vegetarians don't like it. They're killing bacteria. But we do that just by breathing, let alone eating cheese.
I don't know why they call it cheesecake. It really does look more like a pie. Pies are flat and cakes aren't, unless they're fallen cakes, and in that case they aren't good anymore. Although there are some flat cakes. Like pancakes. But those aren't the same thing at all. They're not even really cake. Don't they call them flapjacks in Dollet?
Why's it so quiet? Why is Zell staring at me? Shit, everyone's looking at me. Is there something on my face? Am I supposed to be answering a question? Better say something.
"...whatever."
***
By the time he had worked out that Headmaster Cid had probably never passed a SeeD test to attain his position, it scarcely mattered because Seifer had escalated from plans to get a political chokehold on the Balamb GARDEN system to plans to get a political double underhook suplex on the entire Balamb continent so that he could outlaw pie from ever being served on the island again. Or at least, outlaw any defective pie dough from ever being manufactured again.
“You should add some flour to the rolling pin,” Squall observed from behind him. “Otherwise the dough will keep sticking to it.”
“Your head will be sticking to it if you don’t piss off,” Seifer snarled, and rolled harder. When Squall turned away, he grabbed a scoop of flour and threw it at the dough, sneezing when it billowed in his face unexpectedly.
“Did you just sneeze on the dough?”
“Yes.”
Squall shrugged, and went back to whisking while staring at the wall. The cream in his bowl had long since passed the state of whipped and was well on its way to being brutalized.
Seifer sneezed again deliberately, hacked a couple times for good measure, and returned to bending the dough to his will. Perhaps it wasn’t the dough that was defective at all. Perhaps it was the rolling pin. He discarded it and looked around for a better instrument with which to express his dominance.
Sometime after Squall had realized that his whipped cream had become butter-again-he found Seifer carefully cutting a firecross symbol in the top of the pastry dough. He looked closer and frowned.
“Did you use a meat hammer to flatten the dough?”
“None of your goddamn business.”
“It doesn’t look right.”
“It’s fine.”
“The dough doesn’t cover the pie all the way.”
"I'll cover you," Seifer growled under his breath and gripped the meat hammer tighter.
Squall stared at him. "That doesn't even make sense," he said.
Where Squall's more unfortunate decisions could be blamed on hormones, apathy, and overlong mental soliloquies, Seifer's decisions were (while occasionally hormonal) mostly rooted in sheer bastard nature. And yet, contrary to popular opinion, Seifer had startlingly similar thought patterns to Squall.
His just tended to resolve themselves rather more quickly.
A very small portion of his brain wailed out that he must not do this, but Seifer had always been skilled at ignoring that voice. He took a good look at their pie, which was actually beginning to look like it might one day be edible.
Seifer mentally said a brief goodbye to another chance for making SeeD, picked up the pie, and shoved it squarely into Squall's face.
***
GARDEN did not pay overtime.
This was a regrettable fact, because if it had, Quistis would have been independently rich by the time she was seventeen. At nineteen, she probably would have been able to buy her own airship fleet. And at twenty-one, she could have comfortably retired with her own private island and formed a small independent nation, somewhere far away where any use of the words "Garden" and "SeeD" were still strictly botanical.
However, GARDEN did not pay overtime.
The official explanation was that unmonitored SeeD teams on away missions could too easily abuse the payroll. Or, Quistis thought, they had somehow seen into the future for this very day and realized that they would have to immediately start stockpiling their gil in order to cover the potential damage costs. Either way, she was going to have to perform far above and beyond her usual line of duty, with the knowledge that she'd still only be making normal wage. Days like these made her occasionally wonder what it would have been like to have gone AWOL on her first SeeD test, disappearing into the Trabian wilderness and having to live entirely apart from any sort of human civilization.
Zell rolled by her feet, involved in some sort of wrestling match with Raijin. Fujin followed closely behind, kicking at the fighting pair and not seeming to mind particularly if her foot hit Zell or Raijin. She did, however, still seem to be supporting Raijin. There was a lot more of Raijin to kick; that she seemed to be hitting both at an equal rate spoke of some effort to avoid her partner.
At the moment, Trabian snowfields did not seem like entirely unreasonable places to be. At least they would be quiet. And snowlions never broke into cleaver-wielding melees.
"Right," Quistis said mildly. "Right."
Squall came skidding across the countertop, directly towards her. She took a small step to the side, letting him crash off one end, and looked closer at the countertop, running one finger in the shiny trail left behind. Sniffed. Vegetable oil. She looked over the counter, where Squall was having some amount of trouble getting to his feet. Yes, he was quite soaked in it. There was also whipped cream in his hair.
A small part of Quistis's mind told her that in other circumstances, she might enjoy the view.
Seifer suddenly loomed before her, also soaked in-- was that molasses? Whatever it was seemed to be sticky; there was a teaspoon and three measuring cups of different sizes clinging gummily to his back. He dove over the counter at Squall-- really, Quistis thought, he was ridiculously over-dramatic; he could have just as easily taken two steps to the left and gone around the counter, and he wouldn't have gotten vegetable oil on himself-- and knocked Zell's mixing bowl off the counter in the same motion. Quistis jerked aside, and the bowl missed her by an inch.
On the floor, Seifer tried to grab Squall and knock his head against the oven, but Squall slipped out of his grip-- on purpose or just because of the oil, Quistis wasn't sure-- and kicked him in the sternum. His foot stuck briefly to Seifer's chest, and only came away with a lot of tugging. They flailed together for a moment, neither of them able to move well, and settled for scrabbling on the floor and hitting each other with whatever came to hand.
Quistis blinked. She hoped vaguely that by doing so, the world would somehow change and she wouldn't be watching Seifer try to stick an eggbeater up Squall's nose. No, still the same.
She put two fingers to her forehead and rubbed. The batter in Zell's bowl had splattered her glasses. She took them off, careful to grip them by the stems instead of the lenses, and ran them under the water faucet. There was a tea-towel hanging on the cabinet to her left, and she used the cleanest corner to dry her glasses before firmly replacing them levelly on the bridge of her nose. Then, she took them off again and stowed them safely in her pocket.
“I’m going to kill Seifer,” Quistis said to no one in particular. This would make her (not including any direct participants in the Galbadian-Balamb invasion) the one hundred and seventeenth person out of the seven hundred and forty nine people who would eventually have that exact resolution at some time in their lives.
Her hand dropped to the whip at her waist.
***
Across the room and amid the chaos, Nida was encapsulated in his own small space of tranquility, as he continued tiptoeing towards his oven with extreme care. He was running perfectly along schedule, but it never hurt to be cautious. Only the most dedicated cadets would make SeeD and he saw no point in taking chances.
Besides, he'd always rather liked cooking.
Scarcely daring to breath, he eased the oven door open just the barest sliver, just enough to see how things were progressing. Heat and the warm fragrance of chocolate billowed out against his face; he didn't even need to glance at the glossy pages of his cookbook to know that everything was just as it should be. The pans in the oven each had a mellow gleam under the motion-activated sensor light. Perfect.
Seifer was flung across the room, courtesy of a perfectly-executed flying mare by Squall, and hit the wall next to Nida with a room-shuddering thud.
The tops of all four rounds of his excruciatingly lovely, scrupulously assembled, light as a feather, quadruple chocolate layer cake collapsed simultaneously.
Even its death was a masterpiece, the way it gracefully settled into ruin with four simultaneous sighs of escaping air, like wistful breaths released upon realizing the loss of a glorious future in the center of a dessert table in Dollet. There was dignity to the way it diminished; even the heat shimmers over the pans seemed to pause in respect for the passing. The only thing that remained unchanged was the smell of the chocolate, a thick, sweet elegy that swelled out of the oven and into the rest of the room.
Nearby, Seifer leaped to his feet, threw a double handful of the intricately molded marzipan figures Nida had created of the Dollet cabinet as decoration for his cake, snatched a carving knife, and dashed back into the fray.
Nida sat heavily down on the floor, still wearing his oven mitts. His grade could be salvaged, he thought. He could probably scrounge the nineteen essential ingredients from the various workstations. There were only twenty steps involved. Three extra hours of cooking weren't that long. It would be nothing at all for an ambitious SeeD applicant and the faster he got on it, the better.
The sound of the oven door shutting was like the final snap of a T-Rexuar's jaws closing on an unwary cadet.
"Now it's on," he breathed, and grabbed his own carving knife.
***
The results of the next twenty-three minutes resulted in the second largest ever mass-detention assignment given by the Disciplinary Committee and accompanying SeeD in the history of Balamb Garden.
Few were brave or stupid enough to point out the irony that if the Disciplinary Committee itself had been included in this assignment, it would have taken the record. The record still belonged to another memorable occasion: one month earlier, February 13, the infamous waltz seminar that degenerated into an all-out brawl between SeeD and SeeD candidates, which caused eight hundred thousand gil worth of damage and enough serious injuries to actually deplete the infirmary of hi-potions. Speculators had gossiped that the brawl originated over disagreements over who would lead-- hardly avoidable when the seminar leaders had realized there was a shortage of female SeeD to help teach, and resorted to matching up cadets regardless of height or gender.
Curiously enough, the Disciplinary Committee had also been present at this seminar but its members were not included in that resulting detention assignment either.
***
Xu had heard the news and came as soon as she could.
"Where's Cid?" She looked around. "And what happened to all the cooking sherry?"
"The headmaster is in his office going over the expense forms for the damage and smoothing things over with the Dolletian wedding caterers," Quistis said. "I think the cooking sherry is helping him."
"Ah."
"What little Seifer left, anyway."
"Ah."
Xu infused the single syllable with all the not inconsiderable experience that having helped teach the waltz seminar a month earlier had given her. She had also already clocked in as the ninety sixth person out of the seven hundred and forty nine people who would at some point have designs on Seifer's life.
"I told you to pretend to have some sort of debilitating disease in order to get out of doing this. I told you."
"I know," Quistis said forlornly, "but there was no one else and I don't think anything short of leprosy would have gotten me out of it. Besides, you didn't fake a broken leg for the waltz seminar like you said you were going to."
"I should have," Xu muttered darkly. "I'm surprised I have toes left at all. Not to mention Almasy refusing to put his gunblade down while dancing and nearly taking off Dincht's head on the pivot. Accident, my ass."
"I have half a box of powdered sugar on my skirt, egg on my boots, I think some pecans went down my blouse, and there's icing in my hair, Xu." Quistis closed her eyes wearily. "Please tell me that I can use your shower, because mine's broken and I don't want to use the commons."
Xu made proper sympathetic noises. "You can use mine, but I think it'll take the hot water a while to come back, if the amount of people I saw going into the dormitory commons have anything to do with it."
"Just my luck," Quistis said. She reached around without opening her eyes, raised her hand, and made a swift movement. Xu moved back hastily, but still caught a palm full of icing to her left cheek. Quistis opened her eyes in accusation. "You should have suffered here with me."
Xu gave Quistis a long look, reached out with one finger, and swiped a bit of icing off Quistis's temple and examined it. She smiled. "Well, we don't necessarily need the showers right away, do we?" She licked her finger. "Mm, buttercream."
"Sticking one's fingers in food for testing isn't hygienic, and will result in point detention," Quistis said primly, but smiled back. "Come on, I think there might be a bottle of Amaretto that Seifer missed."
***
"The important thing is," Seifer explained, "that we won."
"Right!" Raijin said, still anxious to stay on Seifer's good side. "Flawless victory, ya know?"
"OWNED," Fujin agreed.
"Although I don't know how I'm going to get all this crap off Hyperion," Seifer grumbled. "I don't know if the cleaner I usually use can handle it. Can you believe this? My baby's all sticky and--" he shuddered-- "dinged."
There was a companionable silence for a few moments, broken only by the gummy clicks of a gunblade clogged with pure Timber maple syrup.
"So, um." Raijin bit his lip. "How much longer do ya think we'll have to hide out in this tree? Because every time the T-Rexaur comes by, I think it's getting hungrier."
Beneath the training center tree, the T-Rexaur paced, sniffed the air, and occasionally roared.
Seifer gave Raijin the most scornful look he could present under the circumstances, managing to look as he were lounging about and waiting for the president of Esthar to present him with a personal commendation, instead of sitting uncomfortably astride a tree branch that was only a few feet above a large and hungry reptile. It was a skill of Seifer's that very few GARDEN inhabitants had also mastered, and that many envied.
"We're not hiding, Raijin. We're just practicing a strategic tactical removal from the premises."
"HOW LONG?" Fujin demanded.
"At least until they make someone else clean up the kitchen area," Seifer said decisively.
The T-Rexaur let out another frustrated roar and finally stomped off, tailing swinging and nostrils flaring for the last hint of chocolate soufflé a la coated SeeD Candidate. When it had disappeared into the underbrush, Seifer straightened up and started down the tree.
"Let's go be strategic in a place with alcohol. And I bet the Chicken-Wuss is still in the showers. We can flush all the toilets at the same time and scald him."
***
Later that evening, Squall sat in his corner of the detention room. It wasn't exactly a private place, but he had learned not to let that bother him anymore. It was good to have friends, good to at least be incarcerated with those you could depend on, those who would listen and demand nothing, giving no judgement. He didn't know how he could have survived all these years at Garden were it not for his discovery of who to go to in every emotional crisis.
He turned his back on the room, faced the soothingly blank surface of the wall, and started to talk.
"I woke up this morning and I already knew it was going to be a bad day, because I tripped over my gunblade and banged my shin, and I had a song stuck in my head that I couldn't remember the name of, and then the cafeteria was out of orange juice..."
***
The end. Thank the lord.