Title: Extracurricular Activities

Summary: In a nutshell? All the Dissidia characters are in high school together. Antics ensue. I have no shame.

Disclaimer: :( The frowny speaks for itself. Not mine.

A/N: This had to be written the MOMENT I saw fanart of everyone in high school uniforms. Co-written with KASLiNN. (Who is actually the one who demanded it be written, bless her little fangirl soul.)

Oh, great. There was another note.

Frowning, Squall reached into his shoe locker and pulled out the offending piece of paper, noting irritably that the writing was all in red, sprinkled generously with hearts and flowers and little cat faces. Cat faces. Really? Was there a single girl in the school who honestly thought drawing cat faces was the way to get into his heart?

Upon further inspection, he realized that the letter was actually an off-shade of pink, and had been sprayed with some sort of flowery perfume that instantly gave him a headache. Obviously, this person had no clue what he was like or what he really wanted, because beyond the unpleasantly pink and girly love confession, there was a little wrapped box with a tiny note that read, “You don’t seem the type to like sweet things, so I made you this onigiri in home ec! Do your best today!”

Little known fact: Squall loved sweet things. Just because he was dark and moody didn’t mean he couldn’t like sweet food. He would probably die before he told anyone, and would kill anyone who found out, but it would still be nice to come here at the end of the day and find a stack of cookies for once. Just not rice balls again, for Hyne’s sake.

Before he could get much farther in his disgruntled musings, he was pounced on from behind by two small, wiry figures, both yelling, “Squall!” at the top of their lungs in glee.

Just what he needed.

“Zidane. Butz. Get off me. Now.”

“It’s Baaartz!” the taller of the obnoxious duo whined and slid off his back, while the other boy clung on tighter, wrapping his tail around his waist.

“Is that onigiri?” Zidane asked brightly, peeking over his shoulder to inspect the embarrassing letter of confession and lovingly wrapped box of rice balls. His hair was tickling Squall’s neck, and he heroically resisted the urge to flip the stupid monkey face-first into the shoe lockers. It would be nice not to get detention.

“Yes.” With a threatening look that clearly said, ‘Get the fuck off me or I will throttle you with your own tail regardless of my own questionable morals,’ and also, ‘no, you may not eat them,’ Squall crumpled the love note into a pathetic ball and tossed it carelessly over his shoulder without looking. It circled the rim of the trash can behind him perilously for a few moments before it toppled in. The onigiri followed soon after.

Bartz, of course, was scandalized. “Squall-sempai!” he scolded. “You’re just going to throw it away?”

It seemed two death glares were in order this evening. “Yes.”

“Who’s it from?” asked Zidane, who had leapt off his back the moment the onigiri had hit the trash. He was currently pawing through the bin with an eerie sort of determination, and let out a small cry of delight when he found the discarded box of food. Prying it open, he determined that the food was, in fact, still edible, and happily shoved as much in his mouth as possible while offering the remains to a disturbed-looking Bartz.

Squall shrugged, unconcerned, and stuffed his feet into his shoes with a growing sense of impatience. “Don’t care,” he replied, adjusting the fur-lined leather jacket he continued to wear despite the countless ways it broke the school’s dress code. It was his favorite, and the blue and green argyle monstrosity everyone else so dilligently wore was itchy and miserably uncomfortable. Many of the lectures he’d received had extoled the virtues of discipline and overcoming obstacles such as extreme itchiness, but Squall had just cocked his hip to the side and rolled his eyes. Whatever.

Looking frighteningly mischievous, Zidane swallowed a large chunk of onigiri and grinned. “I don’t believe you.”

“Suit yourself,” he snorted and hitched his bag over his shoulder.

The bouncy blond just grinned wider and inched over to Bartz’s side, poking the other boy repeatedly in the side. “Hey, hey,” he stage-whispered, “I think Squall has a lady friend.”

Unbidden, Squall’s eyebrow began to twitch as he gritted his teeth. Okay, now Zidane just had to die.

“Whatever,” he muttered, rather than snapping the monkey’s tiny little waist in two. “I’m going home.”

That caught both Zidane and Bartz’s attention at once.

“What?” they chorused. Simultaneously, they both latched onto his waist and whined, still in perfect unison, “But clubs are accepting new members today!”

He glared through the fray of bangs that had fallen over his eyes. “So?”

Bartz seemed freakishly earnest. “So, what are you going to join?”

“Yeah, sempai!” Zidane chimed. “You should join KENDO with us!”

Kendo. He’d probably kill them. Accidentally, for once.

“I don’t think so.” He tried to pry them off with little success. Damn them and their small, clingy arms. It wasn’t fair that Zidane had an extra appendage to hang on with, and Bartz was just too breakable to push any harder.

“Come on, it’ll be fun,” insisted Zidane with a painfully cheerful expression.

He didn’t even dignify that with a response. Making a swift, split-second decision, he strode purposely towards the front doors of the school – well, as purposely as he could while dragging two small underclassmen on each leg, like a mother smothered by stubborn children.

Squall was not as nice as any mother, though. Once outside, he proceeded as normal, cutting down a path through some bushes that was normally wide enough for him, but Zidane and Bartz were unfortunate enough to be dragged through some pointy branches. That was enough to get them to let go, both howling – Zidane moreso, because apparently several thorns had gotten caught on his precious, vulnerable tail – and that was all Squall needed to be a true bitch and take off running.

He hopped over a series of fences and nearly knocked over an elderly woman cleaning her sidewalk (to whom he did not apologize because he was in a hurry, dammit) before he was satisfied that he’d properly ditched them. He allowed himself to slow to a walk and catch his breath, swiping a hand through his hair to shake it out of his eyes. That had almost been more trouble than it was worth.

And then, without warning, his face was being pressed into the sidewalk and he was eating pavement, with one very annoyed (but still seemingly jovial) Zidane atop his back.

“Bartz is coming around the other way,” the blond reported in a merry tone, digging his elbows into Squall’s back without remorse. “He should be here in a couple minutes.”

He didn’t even respond.

Zidane, of course, didn’t need him to. Without missing a beat, he cheerily continued, “You know what this means, right?”

More silence.

Zidane took the brunet’s face in his hands and lifted it, grinning, so their eyes met. “You’re coming to kendo club!”

Squall could only glare. “I would have rather eaten the onigiri,” he grumbled.

There were three things Squall noticed when they walked into the gym.

Jecht was the club leader.

There were only about four other members.

Cloud was one of them.

Without preamble, he muttered, “Bye,” to the two underclassmen still flanking him, and instantly veered away from them to lean against the wall next to his spiky-haired classmate.

Cloud merely shifted, dropping his blue eyes from the ceiling to linger on his face for a moment. He smiled so slightly that Squall easily could have imagined it. That was kind of a warm welcome as far as Cloud went, so he nodded and grunted in return (an equally warm welcome from his usually stoic self).

A pretty green-haired girl in a tracksuit stood by Jecht, a clipboard clutched to her chest, smiling serenely at the members as they chatted amongst themselves. Moments later, Zidane appeared at her side, all charming smiles and a cute flick of his tail – okay, no. It was not cute. It was annoying, and his tail still had a few thorns stuck to it, which the girl noted with a gasp of alarmed dismay and instantly fetched the first aid kit that was kept nearby for emergencies. This was, after all, a kendo club, and injuries were unavoidable.

For a moment, Zidane locked eyes with him over her head as she fussed over his tail, picking out the thorns and covering the cuts with bandaids, and Squall actually felt guilty. He did not like feeling guilty. It settled in his stomach in a tight ball, so dense that it very nearly made him ill.

He decided to distract himself.

“I didn’t know you were in the kendo club,” he offered to Cloud in a rare show of conversation.

He shrugged, rubbing one gloved hand through his chocobo-yellow hair off-handedly. “Sephiroth-sensei recommended it.”

And suddenly, Squall didn’t want to be talking about this anymore. Zidane and Bartz seemed far more appealing than listening to his classmate’s freaky fascination with their homeroom teacher. Their scary homeroom teacher, who had actually beaten someone with a gigantic meter stick for sleeping during class.

“Okay,” he said, sufficiently disturbed, and immediately walked away. At some point during his brief (but not brief enough) exchange with Cloud, Bartz had joined the green-haired girl in treating Zidane’s tail, and Squall squatted down next to them without a word.

“Was that your girlfriend?” Zidane teased.

Squall blinked and looked behind him. “Who?”

Zidane’s smirk never faltered. It only grew impossibly larger as he pointed over the brunet’s head at Cloud, still leaning against the wall at the other end of the gym and looking only slightly bewildered by Squall’s sudden disappearance.

“Oh, him.” He scowled. “No. Don’t be stupid.”

“Ooh, hostility!” Zidane raised his hands and spread his fingers, waving them slightly in defense. “Don’t get mad. There’s nothing wrong if you swing that way. I mean, I personally wouldn’t mind having you on that playing field.”

He was about to say something terribly immature like, ‘I’m about to swing THIS way,’ and swing his fist right into his smug monkey face, but his reputation and cool public image was saved by none other than Bartz, who reached up and smacked a bandaid over Zidane’s mouth.

“Don’t bait him,” he lectured in a stern, somewhat older brother-y tone.

“Ah wauhnt baighin ihm,” Zidane muttered completely unintelligibly before he grimaced and ripped the bandaid off. He spent a brief moment wincing and rubbing his lips, then frowned and repeated himself, “I wasn’t baiting him!”

“You so definitely were.”

“Butz, drop it,” Squall interjected. “He can’t bait me. Leave it alone.”

“It’s BARTZ!”

And just like that, it felt normal again. Squall and Zidane both proceeded to call him Butz mercilessly throughout kendo practice (during which they just observed, since they had yet to officially join the team), and Bartz whined and pouted until it was time to leave, at which time he declared they should all get dinner together on the way home. No buts. (Or Butz.)

“Ahhhh, that was so good!” Looking completely pleased with himself and every living (and non-living) thing around him, Zidane relaxed in his chair and patted his food-bulging belly, a sleepy smile on his face.

“It was just ramen,” Squall pointed out flatly.

He grinned at him, blue eyes half-mast, slipping closer towards fully closed as the food coma set in. “The best ramen in the world.”

“It was pretty good,” Bartz agreed, always the mediator to their squabbles.

“It’s ramen,” Squall insisted. He swirled the noodles around in the bowl with his chopsticks, poking vegetables back down as they tirelessly floated up to the surface. He hadn’t particularly wanted to eat noodles, but Zidane and Bartz had unwaveringly vowed that they would not rest until they had consumed ramen noodles in his presence. They’d sounded serious, and Squall wanted to go home and do homework at some point in his life, so he’d just caved into apathy and allowed himself to be dragged into the nearest ramen shop.

Oddly enough, he wasn’t quite sure if he regretted it. He was neutral, he supposed. For once.

“Thanks for coming with us, sempai,” Zidane’s boyish voice burst into his thoughts.

“Hn.” He nodded, glancing up from his leftover swirling mass of noodles and veggies, looking right into Zidane’s stare for the nth time that day. He was winking, and Squall instantly looked back down again, his gaze hardening into a glare. His cheeks felt suspiciously warm. He figured it must have been the noodles, so he bent over the bowl and blew on them to cool them off.

“You gonna finish that?” Zidane asked. He leaned over the table, half-climbing on it due to his small stature in order to properly peer at Squall’s food.

The brunet stared at him in muted astonishment. “You’re still hungry?”

At this, the three of them shared a look at Zidane’s engorged tummy. Flushing, the blond covered his stomach with his arms, even his tail joining them to curl protectively around his midsection.

“Nooo,” he replied, obviously lying, and abruptly became suspiciously preoccupied with the wrapper from his straw. He looped it into a knot and held it out to Squall. “Here, think of that girl and pull this apart!”

Squall took it and did so without questioning it. It came apart cleanly; the knot came undone as he pulled. “So?” he asked, quirking a dubious eyebrow in the blond’s direction.

Zidane and Bartz let out a long, consecutive whistle that ended with Zidane nodding in approval and Bartz looking amused.

Immediately, Squall’s confused expression turned violent. “What?” he demanded.

“It’s nothing bad,” Bartz explained. “It just means she’s thinking about you.”

“Oh.” Flatly. He rolled his eyes and threw the pieces of wrapper in Zidane’s hair.

Pouting, Zidane crossed his arms, his tail whipping around behind him in disapproval. “You have no heart,” he said decisively.

Squall just grunted non-committally and finally put down his chopsticks. He was done pretending to eat; more importantly, he was done putting up with these two. “I’m going home now.”

“Nooo!”

Predictably, twin pairs of arms reached out across the table to latch onto him. He’d seen it coming, of course, and was fully prepared to dodge backwards, up and out of his chair and beyond their reach.

“I have homework,” he said.

Zidane’s pout increased tenfold while Bartz adopted a similar expression, both gazing at him with watery eyes and clasped hands. They didn’t say anything – just stared at him with wide, unblinking eyes, young and innocent and wanting.

Squall snorted. “That’s not going to work on me.”

The two instantly dropped the desperate, pleading charade and took up sulking instead.

“Can we walk home together?” Bartz asked, hesitantly hopeful.

“No.” Ignoring his hurt expression, Squall picked up his bag and flipped it over his shoulder, studying them both with narrowed eyes. A disgruntled fold settled between his eyebrows, and he eventually sighed. “I’ll see you at kendo tomorrow,” he compromised.

The pair of underclassmen positively glowed. Zidane reached out across the table, preparing to vault over it and latch onto his waist, but Bartz wisely held him back by his shirt collar.

“Yayyyy!” Zidane was saying, his eyes crinkled in merriment as he grinned and made grabby hands at Squall’s jacket. “Thank you, sempai!”

“Don’t make me regret it,” he said, and meant it. They had better not fuck things up.

Things that did not count as fucking up: showing up to kendo club on time. Showing up after class to demand to be escorted to kendo club. Most other things involving being at or around kendo club in some form.

Things that did count as fucking up: being nowhere to be found.

“I’m gonna fucking kill them,” he said to Cloud almost conversationally after waiting no less than ten minutes for the dumbtastic underclassmen duo.

“Who?”

“Zidane and Butz,” he growled.

Cloud regarded him a muted sort of confusion. “Oh. Bartz.”

“No,” he snapped. “Butz.”

“Bartz,” Cloud insisted, and pointed across the gym to where Bartz was standing in the doorway, bent over with his hands braced on his knees, face red as he panted noisily.

Squall was instantly across the room and in front of him, eyebrows raised critically. “What happened?” he demanded. “Where’s Zidane?”

Clutching his side, Bartz motioned frantically behind him and gasped out, “Bathroom. Disciplinary committee. Zidane’s—”

He didn’t have time to finish, because Squall shoved him bodily out of his way (and, consequently, straight into the wall). Ignoring Jecht’s outraged call (“Get your broody ass back here, Leonhart!”), he went straight to the men’s toilet and burst the door open, startling the four occupants inside so hard they all jumped.

Well, three of them jumped. One was huddled on the floor in a shivering heap, holding the rumpled blazer and rumpled white button-down of their school uniform across his lap. His bangs were shadowing his face, but Squall instantly recognized him.

Zidane.

“What the fuck,” he began, herding the three members of the disciplinary committee into the corner by the sheer force of his murderous intent alone, “is going on here.”

They shared a panicked look before the leader, Seifer (who was unfortunately also Squall’s deranged ex-boyfriend) smoothed his features into a semblance of swaggering confidence. “On account of Tribal being a ridiculous monkey—”

“Hey!” Zidane growled. His tail thwacked against the tiled wall in fury.

Oh, good. That meant he was okay.

“On account of Tribal being a ridiculous monkey, what?” he hissed. Zidane was still sitting on the floor, muscles tight, looking as though he were trying to melt into the knees he was desperately pulling against his chest. Squall’s eyes narrowed. “Why are his clothes off?”

“RUN,” Fuujin (another member of the trio) stated decisively.

Raijin (the remaining groupie and the most annoying in Squall’s opinion) nodded emphatically, already edging along the dirty wall towards the door. “This could get ugly, ya know?”

“Oh, I know,” Squall said. He rolled up his sleeves and growled. “If you do not get the fuck out of here in the next five seconds, I will beat you into the floor.”

They all seemed to take this threat very seriously (the appropriate response). Exchanging another glance between them, they nodded as one entity and made a rather swift and somewhat frantic sprint for the door.

Squall approved. Greatly.

“Hey,” he said, as uncharacteristically soft as possible, and knelt at Zidane’s side. Upon receiving no response, he let his hand hover over the underclassman’s golden head for a brief moment before he made a decision, took the plunge, and stroked his hair.

Zidane flinched away.

Squall frowned. “Hey,” he repeated, firmer. “What happened?”

Silence. It stretched out between them awkwardly, tense and twisted like a phone cord, and Squall shifted uncomfortably as he waited. Eventually, Zidane dragged himself to his feet and tugged his button-up over his head. When his head popped through, he was smiling.

"Oh, you know, just Seifer being an ass," he laughed it off. "He was gonna give me a swirlie and I didn't want to get my uniform all messed up."

Squall arched an eyebrow critically. "I don't believe you."

With a shrug, Zidane pulled on his ugly argyle blazer and flicked his tail behind him. "Well, that's your problem, huh?" He grinned. "How's practice?"

"Doesn't matter." He paused. "I pushed Bartz into a wall."

Zidane visibly balked. "What?"

Embarrassed (but not willing to admit it), he looked aside and said, "I was in a hurry. He was in my way."

He could practically see the wheels turning in Zidane's little blond head as his brain processed this information. His grin flourished and his eyes, already impossibly blue, seemed to grow somehow brighter. "Aww, sempai, were you WORRIED about me?"

Squall fought down the urge to drown himself in the sink. "No."

Clucking his tongue, Zidane sidled up next to him and poked him with his tail. "You totally were!" He winked. "It's okay to be embarrassed. I understand."

"Do you want to die?" he threatened.

"Noooo." It seemed Zidane could sense that he was fighting a losing battle, because he dropped the subject and stepped away. "Hey, wanna find Bartz and skip the rest of practice?"

He paused. That didn't actually sound like a bad idea.

"Sure," he agreed, nodding. "But we might have to take him to the nurse first."

A/N: CRACK. TWO INCREDIBLY HOT BOYS. IT WRITES ITSELF.

R&R!