Toy Soldiers: (by timydamonkey)
Disclaimer: I do not only Final Fantasy 8, nor do I claim to.
Author's Note: This is a short one, so I'll be brief. I wrote this for a prompt by hecatesbrat on insanejournal. It's set prior to the SeeD exam, when everyone is doing their own thing on the boat. It's basically a drabble, reviews appreciated. I am posting a drabble collection, but this is being left out for being over 100 words.
SeeD exams were something that Seifer was intimately familiar with. While there were different candidates all the time, they were all very much the same: they had some sort of sickening overenthusiasm that they might qualify as a SeeD, when they were really little children playing with toy guns. It pissed him off, and then when he'd be declined again for some stupid reason Xu had clearly made up on the spot, those little idiots would qualify over him.
Scrutinising his team, Seifer wasn't at all surprised to see such a person in his team. Bouncing on the spot and jumping up and down, ready for action, Zell Dincht was a prime example of the SeeD candidates who really grated on his nerves.
More interestingly, his other team member was Squall Leonheart. Squall was at least borderline competent (if not as good as Seifer) and not a complete waste of space, but whose bright idea had it been to put the two gunblade specialists in the same group? It'd weaken the other groups considerably.
He thought of Xu again, and suspected it was her machinations. She hated him, and she was young herself: she was not above taking actions out of pure spite, he imagined. She'd be a fly ground under his shoe in any other circumstance, but he couldn't do that here; he had to kowtow to her orders, and couldn't just ignore her.
He was the team leader, though. He intended to lead by logic, not by blind faith, but he saw no need to point that out. Chances were anyway that nothing much would happen, and they'd still find something to nitpick at about him.
He stopped onto the shores of Dollet, another toy town just made for these little toy soldiers, and got ready to fight.