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One of the disadvantages of living on campus during the summer was that not many of the eating establishments were open terribly long.

Zachariah had the distinct disappointment of heading to the cafeteria today, only to discover that it had closed earlier than he expected. He had gotten his head deep into his final project for the summer semester, but he thought he had timed it so that he would not miss the time that the cafeteria shut its doors. It had technically been about twenty more minutes until close, but when he took the time to point that out, they said that they had not had any customers in the past twenty minutes prior to that point.

Assholes.

That was how he found himself at a random eating establishment nearby. He did not particularly care what kind of cuisine they served. Food was, on a whole, tasteless to him, anyway. The only time he noticed anything was when it was overly bitter, and it hit a note that sung with him.

Perhaps it was a little too on the nose.

He sat at a table, facing no one, with a burrito in front of him. He already had forgotten what he had put in it, but at least it was food. It was not a terribly expensive item either, which was the important part, considering he lived on whatever extra refund loan money he had managed to gather from the government for that semester. Eating terribly nice food was not within his budget.

Zachariah lifted the burrito and took a bite out of it, looking so terribly uninterested.

He wished they would shut that damn music off.

Would they take significant offense if Zachariah asked them to shut off that damn music? Probably. He was debating how much he actually cared as he pulled his head up, and noticed something different.

Other customers at the restaurant were to be expected. After all, people did, however unfortunately, need to eat, and cheap places in a relatively close proximity to a campus would almost always be popular. The fact that there was another extant customer existing within the restaurant was not, in itself, a surprise. That was not what caught his attention, not what made him squint his eyes for a moment as he tried to figure out why something seemed particularly off about this particular customer.

For a moment, he pondered if he might have been recognizing someone he had the misfortune of meeting on patrol, but then he remembered there was no recognition between those two forms of his. It likely mirrored for the others.

The man lifted a finger and pointed in his direction. Zachariah quirked a brow.

Perhaps the recognition went both ways?

The burrito was temporarily forgotten as he scraped through his memory banks to figure out where this face may have routed from. Eventually, his mind came to school, and at first he went through university, visualizing the classes he sat in and the partners in group projects he had the misfortune of partaking in. That did not seem to match up. Perhaps a classmate from Hillworth? His appearance may have suited, but that did not seem to match up, either. Meadowview?

No.

In the next moment, he was quite suddenly very interested in his burrito.

There was a part of him that sincerely hoped that if he paid enough attention to his burrito, the man in front of him would decide that no, Zachariah was not Zachariah, and he would move on with his life, and Zachariah would ******** was not what he was gifted with, of course, as his name rang in his ears with a note of tentative confusion. Zachariah took another bite of his burrito, then, giving himself some time to process, to figure out what his response should be, here. Was he expected to smile? It seemed that he was smiling, or at least, making a sad attempt at it. Zachariah was not sure if he had those muscles in his face, still. Worn from lack of usage, perhaps.

How did one respond when a vestige of a past life decided to show up in a current one?

You were in my school, right?

An opening question about school was something that Zachariah could work with; it was neutral enough, something that he was still experiencing. It was a conversation topic he had broached with a few of the knights and senshi he had found patrolling around campus. It was not any kind of question along the how is your family line or the how has life been line, the kind of bullshit people said when meeting someone again for the first time in years which Zachariah had no interest in actually answering.

"Hitch," replied Zachariah, and he was fairly sure his voice hitched a bit. Unfortunate. He would need to control that.

"Yes." A pause. "In New York." Hitch was not a classmate from DCU, or from Hillworth, or from Meadowview. "I did not expect to see you in Destiny City."