Friendship by Sour Schuyler 9.6.4
"I've found that math tends to never like anyone," Ryou agreed. "It's very picky that way."
Friend #1
Yugi Motou
Part 1
"Alright, class." Mrs. Jono, the infamously evil teacher of Domino High school, clapped her hands together. Her perfect red hair shimmered. "I'm putting you in groups of two. You will then list the alphabet, and then think of acronyms that start with each letter. Thirty minutes. This is a major grade. Ready, set... go!" The teacher started pairing off the classmates, who would then frantically scramble to get together and work.
"Yugi! Ryou! You two will work together... Tristan and Joey will work together... Téa and Kaiba will work together..."
Yugi strolled over to Ryou's desk at a fast pace and sat down. "Hi," he said out of breath. "There's SCUBA, MADD, and RYO."
Ryou blinked his beautiful creamy brown eyes like an owl. "RYO?"
"Roll Your Own," Yugi explained breathlessly. "You have any others? That's all that I could think of." Yugi was 5'0", had spiky, tri-colored hair, (red, black, and yellow) and was desperately thankful that he had been paired with Ryou, who had an inventive mind.
Ryou admitted, "We could use computer speak..."
"Right!" Yugi had his pen poised. "So, list some."
"IDK, TY, BRB, YW, LOL," Ryou ticked off on his fingers. "And um..."
"There's a really long acronym that was an official document," they heard Duke boasting. "The USA Patriot Act..."
Ryou eyed Yugi. "Let's just put Patriot Act."
"Got it." Yugi scribbled it down. "Um.. There's H&I."
"And UGI," Ryou said with a satisfied smile, fiddling with the ends of his white hair. Yugi looked up with large eyes.
"What's UGI?" he asked, bewildered that there was an acronym that almost fit his name.
"You Got It," Ryou explained.
"Ah." Yugi wrote that down. "And then there's G2G."
"Of course. And there's..." Ryou scrunched up his face. "Oh! There's Crime Scene Investigation."
"Did you hear that?" they heard Tristan whisper.
"Don't cheat off them, Joe!" Téa Gardner, Yugi's oldest friend, screeched in a scratchy voice. Joey and Tristan both winced.
"But we'll fail..."
"They probably cheated off of us," Kaiba boasted. Ryou smiled weakly. It was a mad rush for acronyms that no one had been prepared for! And yet, he still had other things on his mind... Like what might happen to him when he got home. The Spirit of the Sennen Ring had threatened to break his arm if he told anybody about some guns that he had jacked incognito, but Ryou had promptly returned them with a lie about finding them that morning. So, he was royally screwed by someone who hated royalty. Wah. But, there was no use whining about it. The same things had been happening to him since the 2nd grade, when he received the Sennen Ring. Besides, Ryou was shy and insecure, and didn't really have anybody at this school he could consider a "close friend". Sure, he could've asked Tristan Taylor to bodyguard him for awhile, but that would make him feel even worse than actually breaking his arm.
Life was weird.
"O.I.K.," Ryou heard Kaiba telling Téa. "Option Installation Key." He scowled.
"Techie," he said bitterly, and then, "Did you hear what he said, Yugi? Write that down?"
"Got it." Yugi bit the end of his pen, sickening Ryou just a little bit. "Umm..."
"Let's try some Latin ones," Ryou suggested. Yugi just stared at him. "I take Latin," he elaborated, "and there are some acronyms we use everyday, like AD and EG."
"What about JACK?" Yugi asked.
"What's that?"
"Just Another Contract Killer."
"Cool."
"Yah."
Twenty more minutes later, using their knowledge of Latin, Ryou's knowledge of his mother's doctoring work, and Yugi's small obsession with guns, they had come up with an acronym for every letter except for Z. (Granted, they cheated a lot, but everybody had.) The trembling teens qued for the teacher's desk, they handed in their papers. The bell rang. Kids filed out of the room, heading towards the cafeteria. The first words out of their mouths were averaged to be "bitch".
Yugi and Ryou's paper was on top.
A.D.
B.R.B.
C.S.I.
D.A.R.K.
E.G.
F.A.G.
G2G
H&I
I.D.K.
J.A.C.K.
K.K.K.
L.O.L.
M.A.D.D.
N.O.
O.I.K.
P.A.T.R.I.O.T. A.C.T.
Q.U.I.
R.Y.O.
S.C.U.B.A.
T.Y.
U.G.I.
V.A.
W.I.
X.Y.L.
Y.W.
Z
"Yugi!" The short champion duelist turned around. His large, beautiful violet eyes floated up to his crush's face.
"Yeah, Téa?"
"What did you think of that? Wasn't it hard?" Téa polled, leaning against the locker next to his. Yugi worked on his combination.
"Shouldn't have been for you. You had Seto Kaiba to help you," Yugi prompted. He grabbed a sack lunch out of his small, cubic green locker.
"Yeah, well, that was a joy." Sarcasm dripped from Téa's voice as she rolled her sparkling blue eyes.
"I'll bet." Yugi balanced his binder and his lunch bag on his leg as he attempted to grab something out of his locker.
"Well, we did finish our list though."
"What did you get for Z?"
"ZI; Zoom In."
"Ah, crud. Now why didn't we think of that?" Yugi cried. A person next to him opened their locker, which smashed him in the face. "Oof!"
"Half the class copied off of us," Téa informed him, totally ignoring him newly achieved facial injuries. "I feel like Joseph Sugarman is going to come and yell at us, or something. ...Why does your eye look all bruised?"
"Heh. That's funny, Téa." Yugi finally got the lock back on his locker, and held his binder and lunch sack in his arms. His friend raised her eyebrows.
"...Going to lunch?" she asked. Yugi shook his head.
"No, I'm going to the library. I have math to finish and it's too noisy in the lunchroom. Besides, there's no way I could work sitting next to Joey anyway," Yugi confessed with a small, impish grin he hoped was cute. It was. Téa resisted the urge to giggle and told him she'd see him in class. Then they both parted ways.
Yugi made his way to the dusty library. It was very impressive, with large maple bookcases and ancient computers. The first thing Yugi did, on a whim, was check his horoscope. Miho Nosaka was a big believer in horoscopes, and so she posted them every day from some web site. Yugi's eyes traveled downwards towards the Gemini section.
Try your hand at something new. Your versatility will attract attention and possibly a new partnership.
It also said that today's lucky numbers that day were 2, 14, 23, 32, 38, and 41. Yugi, upon speculation, realized that the "23" had significance because that was how many acronyms Bakura and him had come up with. Cool.
Settling down and a large maplewood table, Yugi set down his binder upon the slab of glass that separated the valuable table from potential damages. He took out a worksheet and a pencil and set to work.
4. If a figure has 4 sides then it is a square
a) if a square, then there are four sides
b) If and only if there are four sides then it is a square
c) true
5. If a triangle is isosceles, then it has two equal sides
Yugi heard the scrape of a chair against the carpet. He looked up to see a startled pale face.
"Oh, sorry," Ryou apologized. "I didn't mean to disturb you."
Yugi shook his head, silky blonde bangs swishing back and forth. "...No, that's okay. What's up?"
"Well..." Ryou stood up and walked around the table, standing on his tip toes behind Yugi to read over his shoulder, despite the fact that he could do this flat-footed very comfortably. "Whatcha working on?"
"Math," Yugi said bluntly. "And it doesn't like me, Bakura, it really doesn't."
"I've found that math tends to never like anyone," Ryou agreed. "It's very picky that way."
"Why do we need math, anyway?" Yugi wondered, tapping his pencil against the table.
"One has to be able to count if only that so at fifty one doesn't marry a girl of twenty," Ryou quoted wisely. But then the Brit's face dimmed, shyness overtaking him. "Um... Yugi."
The smaller boy turned to face his shy friend. "Yeah?"
"Do you want to hang out after school? I don't have anything to do." Ryou knew that he was sealing his own fate, and that this would only make the Spirit angrier than he already was with him. But, besides that... he needed friends.
Yugi smiled, showing off white teeth. "Sure, Bakura."
2nd Draft, May 6
by Sour Schuyler
