Today, Aria Blaze would eat lunch.
This wasn’t exactly some breaking development. Aria had, in fact, eaten lunch in the past. Many people tended to eat lunch every day. There was an entire hour dedicated to serving and eating lunch at Canterlot High School during the aptly named lunch period.
The primary difference between this time and literally every other time that Aria had decided to eat lunch was that this time, she was going to eat lunch during the aforementioned lunch period, within the cafeteria, at one of the tables within said cafeteria, with all the other people that had decided to eat lunch at that very same time in that very same place. As a matter of fact, she was even going to pick from the same selection of food available to them, too, just to really go the extra mile. She was going all in on this one, because by god, was she ever gonna eat some lunch today.
…what, still no medal? Fuck you then.
Aria arrived about six minutes after lunch period started. It wasn’t a statement, that was just when she made the decision to. She stepped into the familiar room, as she had quite some time ago, except this time, she failed to announce her presence by filling the room with one third of a will-eroding song in order to drive every human present into a fervor to fight each other for her entertainment. No one really noticed. Ingrates.
She collected a plastic tray off the pile of plastic trays. She flipped it over to examine the surface, decided it was probably clean enough to eat off of without dying, and meandered over to the relatively short line sticking just out of the limits of the food court with the thing held out in front of her as though in prayer to the great lunch lady in the sky to please give her something halfway edible.
Lunch lady in the sky didn’t give her shit. The actual lunch ladies did, though, when she made her way up to them. The whole time spent in line passed by in a blur - she wasn’t paying attention for most of that time, idly observing her surroundings without actually taking in most of the information, regarding wire rack filled with pop tarts, plastic cover to the salad packet bin, and faces of random teenagers around her with the same half-lidded ‘This is technically something I am indeed seeing with my eyes’ stare. No one spoke to her besides the lunch ladies, who asked if she wanted the cheesy slop or the tomato-y slop. She went with the cheesy slop. It was yellow. Y’know, like cheese. So that’s cool.
With a tray filled with cheesy slop and a couple other things she wasn’t entirely sure she was responsible for putting there, Aria followed the flow of bodies forward and spilled out into the expansive cafeteria around her, tables lined up in their staggered lines and evenly distributed in a vaguely aesthetically pleasing matter. Maybe. If you were into that kind of thing. Aria wasn’t, and so she spent a solid minute standing there outside the food court, taking in the sea of faces and noting how every table here had at least someone at it, usually multiple someones. Some of them she saw looking at her. Way to observe her with your eyes, buddy. Proud of you for staring.
She just started walking after a little while of vacantly looking out at the seating selection. She wasn’t sure where she was going, just glancing about randomly as she meandered her way up the aisle, though that changed when she saw precisely what she was looking for. Lazy stride became lazy stride with a sense of direction, and Aria made her way over to one of the tables to the far right of the room, closest to the wall and the corner.
Turns out the Rainbooms had a table to themselves. Neat. It had some spaces left at it, too. Double neat.
There was a faint clack of Aria’s plastic tray touching down on the table’s surface, and a small squeak of the seat adjusting beneath her weight as she sat down. It may as well have been a pair of gunshots, because conversation immediately died.
Aria pretended not to care. It was easy to do, because she didn’t care. She examined her plate for a minute, then realized a fatal mistake she’d made earlier: no silverware. “One sec,” she muttered to no one, standing back up to go make her way to the food court. If the great lunch lady in the sky had been considering smiting her for her insolence, that judgement didn’t make its way down the pipe before Aria plucked a spoon, a fork, and a knife out of each cylindrical holster, the last one she chose explicitly for the visceral thrill of not using it but throwing it away after her meal was done regardless. Because fuck sea turtles.
Aria then strolled back to her previous destination, rejoining the table that was still as dead silent as when she had left it. Then, fork in hand, Aria Blaze started eating lunch.
Cheesy slop didn’t work so great with a fork. It was cheesy, though. Always a good thing. Unless you don’t like cheese, but those people are wrong, so fuck ‘em. The plastic strewn evenly throughout it pretending to be pasta got a pass, cuz it was in the cheesy slop…oh, neat. Free roll. Where’d she get this again? And better yet, who cared? Get in her face. Damn it, she forgot the milk carton…whatever, cheesy slop was the prime dairy product today. No substitutions or competition. Sounded like something Sonata would agree to.
It was then – and only then, perhaps two to three minutes into her meal – that Aria Blaze deemed fit to look up from her food and take a proper look at the other inhabitants of the table.
The yellow one with pink hair who Aria had sat beside looked like she had a gun to her head and that if she twitched, her brains were going to be the next thing all over her tray. The walking gay pride flag looked looked like she was in the process of receiving a wedgie and was doing her very best to give no outward sign that it was happening. The purple-haired diva was still partway leaned into the cowgirl she had been muttering conspiracy to, and said cowgirl was looking at the newest denizen of their table like she had walked into the wrong gendered bathroom and was waiting for her to realize it. The aggressively pink one had a bewildered look, clearly unsure of how to react. Sunset Shimmer, meanwhile – the only one of them that Aria had ever bothered to learn the name of – had a strained facsimile of a smile that read to Aria like she was trying to recall where she’d packed whatever weapon she had on her without reaching for it. Or like she was holding in a fart. Perhaps both.
All of them were staring. Aria stared back, expression blank, eyes half-lidded. Her half-eaten roll made its way to her mouth, where it was reduced to a quarter eaten roll as everyone in the midst of this little standoff watched. She chose to settle her gaze on Sunset Shimmer, seeing as she gave a fuck about her enough to ever consider knowing her name.
Of the six of them, it was the cowgirl who finally dared to fill the airspace at the table with words. “Can we help you?”
Aria Blaze chewed once or twice more, then swallowed her mouthful of roll. Her gaze drifted between the plastic trays assembled here, noting their contents before seeing fit to respond. “Any of you don’t want your milk? I don’t feel like getting back in line.”
There were a couple of glances exchanged. After several seconds of nonverbal communication, the fancy purple haired one tepidly picked her own milk off the tray, sat it on the table, and then gave the tiny carton a shove, sending it skidding down the corridor of trays towards the newcomer.
It didn’t make it all the way to Aria, but she reached over and pulled it the rest of the way over with a languid, “Sick,” immediately breaking into it for a drink. She was thirsty and decided that the cheesy slop had had its time at the top as prime dairy product.
“Sooooo,” went the walking pride flag, in what seemed like a very poor attempt at sounding casual, “what brings you to our little corner of the cafeteria? We haven’t seen you around here in…” She hesitated, casting a questioning glance around at her companions. “…what, like, months now?”
“It’s been almost half a year,” said the meek pink-haired one, in a voice that Aria was astonished was even remotely audible. “And I don’t think you’ve ever, um…attended this school? Um, before this, I mean…”
Aria responded to both statements with the same lazy shrug, milk carton hanging precariously between her index finger and thumb by the ridge, wobbling back and forth like a pendulum. She felt the weight of it for a while, then decided to use what was left of it to wash down the remainder of her roll. Double kill.
The rainbow one followed up on this silence with more open scrutiny. “Do you even attend this school?”
Aria finished draining her milk carton, casually crushed the container, and let it drop to her tray with a simple, “Nope.”
“Then why the heck are you even here?! You can’t just show up to a school you’re not a part of! You’re not even from this world!”
Aria looked flatly at the rainbow-haired gal. Rather than get even slightly animated like she was, Aria looked her square in the eye, raised her hand up, index finger extended, and let her wrist go limp. Her hand fell forward and when it came to a stop, the finger pointed directly at Sunset Shimmer.
The rainbow one sucked in her lips for a moment, like she’d bitten into a lemon. “…okay, like, fair I guess, but-“
Sunset chose this moment to speak up, verbally pushing past the rainbow one: “I ended up getting enrolled, is the thing. What about you?”
Aria shrugged in response. Her gaze left the others and found her plastic fork, which she was busy trying to balance another glob of cheesy slop on. “These people don’t have the balls to call me out.”
“You’d be surprised.”
“Don’t think I would,” came the smooth retort. Brief pause for a bite. “You and me aren’t exactly in the same category. Unlike you, I’ve got a reputation that extends outside of this one shitty building.”
“And what ya decided to do with that reputation is…” The cowgirl leaned in a bit, squinting at what Aria was currently doing. “…eat lunch where ya ain’t supposed to.”
“Yup.” There was silence, like everyone anticipated there being something else to it. There wasn’t. Aria kept eating.
Finally Sunset seemed like she’d had enough, setting aside the veil of civility to make her demands clear: “What is this about?”
Aria swallowed the latest bite before responding, “Lunch.”
“Bullshit. You came straight over here.”
“You say that like it’s weird.”
“It is. You show up out of the blue where you’re not supposed to be, and you go out of your way to get our attention by doing this. Us in particular.” Sunset gestured at her companions, most of whom had eyes on her in that moment. “Well, you’ve got our attention. If all you wanted to do with that attention was screw around and act like you’re not up to something when it’s obvious you are, then you can go sit somewhere else. Preferably somewhere that you are welcome.”
Under her breath, but loud enough to hear, Aria muttered, “Read me the fuckin’ riot act over here, alright, geez.” She flicked her wrist, sending her plastic fork to the center of her tray where it then bounced out of the space and clattered quietly on the table. She then sat back in her chair, crossed her arms, and directed a very inconvenienced look Sunset’s way to meet her hard stare. “I thought you guys were supposed to be the real accepting type.”
“We are,” replied the fancy purple haired one, “but even we have our limits. Those limits include nonsense and disingenuous shenanigans that, at least to me, appear to be afoot.” She leaned forward, elbows coming onto the table as she propped her chin atop a bridge of her interlocked fingers. “Of course, if you had a better explanation, we are listening.”
“An honest one,” threw in the cowgirl, “if ya happen to have one ‘a them on hand.”
“Yeah, out with it!” Rainbow girl was mostly standing by now, hands on the table as she leaned forward enough to have to hold herself up or she’d fall. “What gives?!”
Aria looked between each of the five who’d bothered to speak up with a flat, if bothered look. Her eyes came to rest on the only one of them who hadn’t said anything yet: the pink one with hair that looked like she was trying to aspire to the impossibleness of Adagio’s. From what Aria recalled, she was supposed to be the Sonata of their group, but she’d been silent, not one stupid or goofy remark having come from her as she went about eating her own lunch that had so far been neglected. If she had any particular thoughts about what was happening, they didn’t extend much further than idle concern with her friends’ aggressive posture, which continually earned passing glances.
Aria let a scoff escape her throat, leaning over in her chair as her frown made itself comfortable on her lips. “What I wanted,” she began, an edge in her voice, “was to fucking chill and eat lunch with some people I kinda halfway know the first thing about, but apparently that’s just not good enough. I didn’t know I needed a fuckin’ letter of recommendation to be here, my bad.”
“Ain’t you got your own group?” asked the cowgirl, who took this moment to cast her gaze over the cafeteria. Unsurprisingly, there were several kids looking this way, though just as many were trying to not look and let the Rainbooms handle whatever was going on. “I don’t see ‘em in here.”
“That’s cuz they’re not. And what’s it matter anyway? I wanted to sit here.”
“Well ain’t you three in a troupe or some such? I ain’t never seen any of you separate before.”
“So what are we so worried about again?” the pink one finally piped up. It was an innocent question, but there was annoyance in it as she looked around at her friends. “If she’s here to eat her lunch, just let her eat her lunch.”
Rainbow girl seemed flabbergasted by this. “Just let- whattya mean ‘what are we worried about?!’ Do you know who this even is?!”
“Yes! And so far, you are the ones making a scene about it! I sit in weird places to eat sometimes, you guys never have a problem with it then. Sometimes you just gotta sit somewhere different!”
If there was anywhere Aria expected to get support, this was not it, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to take it. ”Thank you,” she said through an explosive sigh. “Fuck me.”
Things fell apart after that. The pink one and the monument to gay rights got into an animated discussion about why it was different with her and sitting and whatever the fuck. Miss yeehaw got pulled in at some point with purple nurple trying to mediate and bring it down. Sunset tried to get a word in edgewise but was overwhelmed by both sides of it. The meek one looked like she was at once descending into the astral plane and also about to have a panic attack.
While this unfolded, Aria watched on for a little while, wondering if maybe her gem was somehow working despite being in pieces right now. Was it always so easy to cause shit like this to happen, or was it only this way when she wasn’t actually trying to make people fight?
She looked down at her tray. The cheesy slop was just yellow smears in the square it had occupied. The roll was gone. The milk was drank. The…is that applesauce? She was contractually obligated to ignore that shit. She wasn’t even sure if it was there when she sat down at this table, so writing that off as not her responsibility. It would appear that she had, in fact, eaten lunch. This was all she had intended to accomplish today, and given the state of things and how it had been going, she was content to call it there. Today probably wouldn’t get better than this.
Aria stood up from the table, took her tray into her hands, and walked away from the debate unfurling behind her. Someone might have said something. She dutifully ignored it. She marched to the door, pitched the entire tray into the trash can, and walked out of the cafeteria the same way she’d come.
Truth be told, that had probably gone over rather poorly…or at least, it would have, if she had literally any other expectations today than to eat lunch. She did, in fact, eat lunch, and therefore this day had been an overwhelming success. A win is a win.
Aria shoved her hands into her pockets, walked out the front door to CHS, and didn’t stop walking till she made it back to the van, which she sequestered herself inside of and decided to do absolutely nothing else for the rest of the day.
Another day in the exciting life of a siren.