Takashima - Hello! My name is surname is Takashima! Nice to meet you! This is a simple short story I wrote for my English class the other day. Please enjoy it!

Disclaimer: The characters in this fanfiction are borrowed and are not mine. They belong to Kazuki Takahashi.

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Employer and Employee

"Those weeks I spent with him," Seto thought as he sat at his broad oak desk, staring at the polished door idly, "I wish... I wish they didn't end." It was the end of summer vacation and students were beginning to get ready for the new school year. The vacation was fleeting, so much joy was shared during the short four weeks of rest and relaxation.

Seto Kaiba, the corporate CEO of Kaiba Corporation, was working. Or at least he was trying. Sitting in his big black chair, he looked down at the piles of papers that rested in his hands. Words after words, they began to blend together, looking almost the same as the next. He was thinking that maybe there was something wrong with his eyes and he removed the thin framed reading glasses from the bridge of his nose. And with his fingers, rubbed his eyes.

When he replaced the glasses back onto his nose, he still couldn't tell the difference between the words. Sitting back in his chair, he let out a sigh. "What's wrong with me?" Seto said, frustrated. He wasn't usually like this. He could always work in the worst conditions. But, this, today? "I can't deal with this." And he rose from his seat. He stepped around his desk and crossed the large room to the coat rack that held his favorite black trench coat.

He took it and put it on and was quickly out his office door. The hallway had a certain sanitary smell to it but it wasn't quite similar to that of a hospital's generic sanitary scent. "Hold all my calls till tomorrow and cancel all my appointments for later this evening," he said as he strode past his secretary. He didn't wait for a response from his employee as he quickly stepped into the silver caged elevator.

The doors shut as soon as he entered. Without a glance, his slender finger pressed the main lobby button on the control panel and he felt the gentle drop of the chamber as it was being lowered to the requested floor. His shoulders were stiff as he stood up straight and his lips were pursed as usual, yet there was nothing and no one to bother him in there, so why so serious in a place where no one else was?

His mind was drifting. He was unconsciously remembering the time he spent with him during the summer vacation.

"Seto! You shouldn't be so serious all the time!" A boy with blonde hair laughed. "You'll get your face stuck that way for the rest of your life and your future kids will be afraid of you!"

He shook his head when he felt his heart throb. He didn't want to remember but it was one of his best memories, if not the most enjoyable. This blonde boy was so carefree and in a way, Seto had admired that characteristic and adored it even though he would never admit it.

The elevator gave a soft ding before the doors slid open. As he set out, he took in the usual sight of the white marble floors, multiple glass triangle chandeliers hanging from the tall ceilings, the broad windows above and circular secretary desk in the center. They were the same usual things he saw everyday when he left. And as he crossed from the elevator to the glass doors of the front of the building, he heard a "have a good night, Mr. Kaiba" from his dutiful employee. He responded with a nod and kept on his way.

The sun was already behind the horizon beyond and the skies were beautifully dark and streaked with the most amazing oranges, pinks and radiant goldenrod. Goldenrod, just like his hair. Seto frowned. The similarities were driving him mad.

"I have to stop thinking about that damned mutt!" Seto snarled under his breath as he walked onto the sidewalk. The people walking alongside him seemed to know who he was but didn't seem to want to bother him. Must have been his intimidating expression...

It didn't matter to him where he was going at the time. And when he finally looked up, he found himself in the park where he had first talked to him seriously. His face grew wistful as he recalled the moment.

--

"What are you doing, Mutt?" Seto had snarled.

The blonde boy turned to look at the tall brunette, "None of yer damned business, Kaiba!" This boy always had a way to tick him off and that day had been no different.

Seto had felt a vein throb at his temple but his face had remained calm. "Katsuya, why aren't you hanging out with your 'friends?' Or did they up and abandon you like the mutt you are?" These words were cold and almost vicious. However the words didn't do anything but anger the blonde.

The blonde boy's brown eyes narrowed. "No, Kaiba, and fer yer information, they're at school," he snarled softly.

"And why aren't you? Thinking about committing yourself to a kennel?" A humored smirk played at Seto's lips. He had been watching this boy ever since he had met him. At first, he saw this boy as nothing but a nuisance, however, ever since the end of the tournament that he had hosted only a short two months ago, he saw this boy in a different light. Strong and loyal, just like a dog. A mutt.

"Pfft!" The boy turned his back to him. "If it should be anyone, it should be you, Kaiba!" His hand was digging through the pocket of his tacky, green salvation jacket. He continued to speak, "Anyway, thanks fer coming by. I know that you don't like me or Yug' or the others, but we thought it would be nice if you could start being our friend by us giving you this."

Seto closed his sapphire eyes and turned his face to the side. His cocky attitude had shaped his malicious and snappy reply, "Humph! Whatever! I don't see why I'm wasting my time. I don't need whatever pathetic gift you're planning on giving me, Katsu--" But he was interrupted.

Katsuya's hand was outstretched and his palm was open towards the brunette. It was holding onto something small and silver. As Seto stared at the trinket in the blonde boy's hand, he was shocked at what adorned the faceplate of the item; the face of his most beloved monster, the Blue Eyes White Dragon, and the chain connected to it had a beautiful sterling hook that could easily be attached to a belt loop on his jeans or a clip on his wallet.

With a flip of his thumb, Katsuya opened the beautifully crafted lid and inside, a clock. The arms of the watch were designed to be the shape of the dragon's silver wings and on the face stood small shining aquamarines, adorning each hour with their lustrous beauty.

The stunned expression on Seto's face amused Katsuya enough to produce a soft chuckle. A passing breeze swept his long bangs in front of his face and touseled his shoulder length mane into the air restlessly. Softly, he began to speak, "It's unique, Kaiba, because it's the only one in the world." He had closed his palm and withdrew his hand to his side. He waited for Seto to look him in the eyes.

"So, Kaiba, will ya accept our token of friendship? Honest to Kami, we don't want to fight anymore with ya. We just wanna be friends with 'cha."

The next few minutes were silence. Seto hadn't known what to do. This had never happened to him before and he stood, losing his composure a smidge, as he watched the blonde in partially masked surprise. A shaky smirk appeared at his lips and this made the other boy step back warily, "What is this? Some kind of joke, Katsuya!?" His heart had begun to tremble. He was scared, and the only way he knew how to deal with it was to hide behind his proud visage and a spiteful smirk.

Katsuya must have been studying Seto's face. When he reached his hands up and nested the tall brunette's face between his palms, it surprised and flustered Seto beyond words. It was enough to make the colors in his cheeks glow. The blonde pulled him down to his height and his lips wore a heartrending frown, "No, this is not a joke, Seto Kaiba." And with that, his hands pulled back; the left taking Seto's right and with the right putting the elegantly designed pocket watch into his palm. He enclosed Seto's fingers around the watch with his hands and he stepped back. "It's for you."

---

Seto's mind dispelled the memory when his body detected the presence of another person close to him. His sharp eyes looked behind him first instinctively. There was nothing there, just the path he had taken to get there and brightly lit street lamps with hooked heads. He waited. There was still nothing there. "My imagination," he muttered grumpily. He let out a sigh and his blue eyes wandered up to the sky.

The sky was a creamy blend of azures and blacks with white dots, almost like a quilt. A warm, comfortable quilt that could never be reached with a single pair of grasping hands. The night's gentle wind played with Seto's cropped hair as if forcing him to remember that time. That time with Katsuya and no one else.

The sudden shrill of a muffled cell phone in his front coat pocket woke him up from his shortly-lived reverie. At first dumbfounded, as if trying to figure out what it was, his hand reached into his pocket to pick up the small gray communication device and put it to his ear. "Yes?"

The voice on the other end of the phone sounded excited and breathless, "Big Brother!"

His tone was ever cool and composed, "What is it, Mokuba?"

"Jounouchi-kun!" The young sounding voice was panting, as if he had rushed to the phone hastily, "He's in the hospital!" Seto could feel his blood run cold and his heart nearly stopped.

"Seto?" Mokuba asked, "Seto, did you hear me?" However, the young boy heard the raspy static in his earpiece suddenly and pulled the phone from his ear. His older brother had hung up on him.

"I can't believe this!" Seto thought as he ran from where he stood to the park's exit. "I can't believe this!!!"

---

"Stop fidgeting so much or you'll open your wound again!" Seto had snarled one day. He disposed of the q-tip into the wastebasket and a few bloody gauze.

"Owwww!" Katsuya winced, "I can't help it! You don't even know the meaning of being 'GENTLE!'" He withdrew from Seto's helping hand as he was trying to apply ointment to his eye.

"If you stopped moving so much," the CEO had grabbed the blonde's head with his hand and forced him to stay still, "it wouldn't have to hurt so much!" After a few minutes, he was finished. "There." The blonde boy's effeminate hand gingerly touched the skin below his black eye and it hurt even there. He hissed his displeasure but he had to endure. It was his prize for winning a fight with Tristen against the West Academy gang, their rivals for territory.

Katsuya's eyes fell onto the broad shoulders of the tall brunette as he put away the first aid kit away neatly. "Kaiba, why did you do all this for me?"

"What?" He asked gruffly as he opened a wooden cabinet hanging to his right.

The boy scooted off the stool, watching Seto put the kit back to its rightful place before repeating himself, "Why did you do all this for me?"

Seto turned around and looked down at Katsuya and for a moment, he was quiet. Thinking of a reasonable and logical explanation, but he couldn't come up with one. Then finally, he answered slowly, "You're my employee."

The blonde boy's expression faltered only slightly when his boss made this statement. Seto had seen it but he didn't know what to make of it. Keeping quiet, he watched him for several more seconds before turning to leave the medical ward of his mansion, leaving Jounouchi alone. He remembered thinking, "What.... was that? My chest it felt... strange just then..."

---

At that time, during summer vacation, Seto had employed Katsuya at his company to work for him as a game tester. He would test games that ranged from old fashioned board games to anything from simulators to motion sensory captures. It was a job that anyone would have killed for, and he had gotten it.

During the first week of starting this job, Katsuya was working inside of his Boss' home, in the gaming lab in the second sublevel basement under the mansion. It was the end of the night and he was heading home. Taking the elevator, he had pressed the incorrect button and ended up on the second level of the luxurious mansion, the dormitory level.

He had no idea where he was and the elevator's doors had closed behind him. There had been no way back. With no other alternative, he followed the long and narrow corridor. It was deathly quiet and not a servant of the Kaiba household were in sight. As he traveled along, he had come across a room where its door was left ajar.

Even though he wasn't suppose to be there in the first place, he had walked stealthfully to the jarred door to investigate. It was clear that his intentions to sneak a peak through the crack were purely innocent however, his curiosity had also clouded his better judgment. He would soon regret his mistake.

When he got there, he could see into the room. The walls were bare and there was a single bookshelf on the far left wall. There were also a few large potted plants here and there. As he moved to the side more, he saw the edge of a large desk and someone there.

Seto was reading a book when he sensed someone by the door. Slowly, he put down his book and just as he rose from his seat, he heard footsteps striding quickly from the door and down the hall towards the stairs. Right when he was out the door, he saw Katsuya trip over his own foot and he parasailed down the two flights of stairs, hitting the hard marble floor below heavily.

Luckily for the mutt, none of his bones were broken but he had several cuts on his cheeks. "I'm fine," Katsuya had said with a pained smile when Seto's younger brother, Mokuba, came to see how he was.

At the top of the stairs, Seto stood there watching, quietly. He had been worried but with his brother there, he didn't want to say anything to his employee. It would have shattered the image of the 'working relationship' that Katsuya and himself shared in his brother's eyes.

---

That was then and this was now. Seto's face was slick with a thin sheet of perspiration and he was panting. He rounded a corner and continued weaving his tall and nimble body through crowds of people, not noticing or stopping to apologize to the people he bumped into occasionally on accident. All that was on his mind was his so-called employee, Jounouchi Katsuya. In his mind, he was hoping that he was alright, hoping that nothing serious had happened. Not like the last few times.

Over the course of summer vacation and Jounouchi's employment with Kaiba Corporation, the boy had been hospitalized at least two times. The first had been indirectly Seto's fault and the second, during a lunch date with his Boss and his younger brother, Mokuba at an exotic restaurant where an old gang of his kidnapped him and nearly beat him until Seto appeared to rescue him, riding a modern metal steed, a Harley Davidson.

The hospital was just up ahead. The driveway was full of patients' cars and was blocked from the street to the automatic glass doors. In spite of this, it wasn't completely inaccessible. Seto jumped the metal rails and onto the front lawn then bolted across the grass. He skillfully navigated around the cars and through the doors into the packed lobby.

Unselfconsciously, Seto's hand was in his pocket, holding onto something that was given to him in his palm as his mind chanted repeatedly for Jounouchi's health. He approached the front desk. A glass window was the only barrier between him and the nurses.

"Can I help you, Sir?" The nurse had a calm smile on her face. It was her job to put the patient's family or friends at ease as she helped them find their way around the medical facility.

Seto was trying desperately to keep his face composed and strong as he spoke with her, "I'm looking for Jounouchi Katsuya's room, please." He watched her tip her head down as she looked in a large black book that held the basic records and room numbers of their in-patients.

"He would be in room two hundred and eleven, Sir," she looked up and she saw no one standing there. As she stood from her little revolving chair, looked after a hasty sounding trail of steps, she saw the man in the black trench coat that had asked her for information disappear into the hospital's elevator.

Seto Kaiba was his name. He was the cold, calculating CEO of Kaiba Corporation, Japan's number one toy company. And he was in the hospital, heart racing, blood icy, coming to visit one of his employees that had just recently been hospitalized. "What am I thinking?" Seto thought as the elevator took him to the second floor, "I'm just visiting an employee at the hospital." After all that time, he was still convincing himself that this was just a working relationship. "Any employer would visit their employee if he was sick. It's natural!"

He found himself bolting out the elevator doors as soon as the charming ding of the elevator chirped. Almost jogging along the white, sanitary smelling corridor, he quickly found room two hundred and eleven without any form of help from the staff on the floor. The door seemed like an archway, a golden door that lead him to the person he wanted to see the most.

He could hear the thunderous beatings of his heart in his ear. There was a wad of saliva sitting in the back of his throat and as his hand reached the door knob, he swallowed down on it hard. With a flick of his wrist, the door swung open.

The room was dark and the only source of light in the room were the IV monitors. He stepped in silently, shutting the door gently behind him, careful not to let it make a sound when the lock fixed together. His eyes took a moment to adjust to the darkness of the room. When his eyes were able to see fairly through the dark, he noticed a body in the bed before him. Again, his heart beat furiously.

'Jounouchi,' he wanted to say, but couldn't. His voice had dried up.

As he neared the bed, something shifted under the sheets. "Seto?" A familiar voice asked softly.

His voice sounded sure, "Yes, it's me."

"What are you doing here?"

"I came to visit my employee, Jounouchi." It wasn't a hundred percent a lie. Silence followed his statement. It made him feel uncomfortable.

"Oh..." The voice seemed disappointed, and this made Seto's heart throb. He didn't want to say it like that, 'visit my employee,' sounding as if Jounouchi had only been a tool to him. On the contrary, Jounouchi was more to him than that. "Well," the figure in the bed began softly once again, "As you can see, Ah'm a-ok. So you can go, Boss-man, don't waste your time with me." Katsuya's nickname for Kaiba.

Even though it wasn't the time for it, Seto really despised that pet name, "Don't call me that, Katsuya."

A soft chuckle, "I'm sorry, MR. Kaiba.."

The employee was teasing his employer even in his sickly state. "If you're going to speak to me like that, I'll go." And he turned toward the door.

"No!" The boy sat up in bed quickly, "Ah'm sorry. I appreciate your coming to visit me, really!"

As if on cue, Seto's heart began to beat even faster than it had before. He continued to play it cool, regardless. "Good." He returned to the bedside. He was grateful for the dark cover. He was grateful for the privacy of the room. And most of all, he was grateful for the knowledge that Jounouchi was all right.

"Thank yo-" Katsuya froze where he sat. His eyes widened for only a moment before he closed them. When Seto pulled back, the boy blushed and stammered, "K-Kai-Kaiba?? Why?"

It had taken all his courage to do what he did. Kissing Jounouchi. It was something that he had been wanting to do and he felt that if he hadn't, he would have never gotten a second chance. He realized how many times he had hurt him and no matter how many times he would have apologized, the pain in his and Jounouchi's heart would never heal with mere words. A kiss was all that it took to heal his wounds. The wound of their hearts.

"Because you're more than just an employee to me, Jounouchi," Seto said.

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Takashima - I'm not sure if I want to but, there might be a sequel to this. We'll see how you, my reader's respond!