-shuffles in- Um, ok, so I was extremely lazy. I want to say right here and now that I am greatful to everyone who kept badgering me with PMs and emails asking me why I haven't posted yet . I got a big urge today and sat down and wrote the first chapter to the sequel I promised about ten months ago, haha. Is the submission thing being weird for anyone else? The only way I could get this to upload was by putting it into oldschool NotePad! Microsoft Word and WordPad yielded nothing. Oh well. It doesn't take too much effort; I just need to go back in manually and do the itallics and boldness again. I'm hoping I can continue on with this relatively on schedule; however finals are coming up (I'm in college now!) and I'll be studying a lot. We'll see. I love you all! Hope you're not too mad at me for not posting sooner! ... well, I hope more that you'll like the sequel, but we shall see. Enjoy!
From the last chapter of Kiseki...
"Aishiteru… Seto."
Those words… those horrendous words. They left Seto Kaiba with nothing. He wondered how the hell she thought that would be a good parting gift, because all it did was make him more pissed off that she wasn't there. As he sat in his room at his desk, he repeated the words to himself incredulously. She was gone; she's gone forever.
It had now been three months since she had left. Yet he was still thinking of her, like she had left yesterday. Mokuba had gotten fed up with him weeks ago and actually made some friends to have ice cream with every night. Why couldn't he move on? He had work to do!
"Kiseki…" he murmured her name to himself for the thousandth time. It means "miracle"... some hellish miracle she was. He slammed his fist upon the table. He had to stop this. Something had to be done to take care of the turmoil within his ice-cold barriers. Thinking about her didn't work, nor did the opposite, as his mind would scream "Don't think about her" and he'd picture her in his mind. If not being able to see her was hell either way… then… He clenched his fists, biting his lip.
That was it. It was so simple, but... He shut his eyes and thought of the girl that had turned his world upside down and thrown it away. Could he really...? A few seconds' more thought and he made up his mind with a pounding heart. As he stood up and walked over to his closet, he pulled out a suitcase.
"Aishiteru, Seto…" No way in hell was he going to let that be the last of it.
The Turmoil of Love
Seto did not actually end up leaving until after Christmas.
When he decided to pack his bags, he nearly hit himself for not thinking harder about his rash decision. Not only did he not know where she lived, but the geography of the United States was completely foreign to him. The only thing he knew was the fact that there were a lot of states or provinces or some irrational divisions like that. The address she had left on the back of the painting was where she was living in Japan; he suspected even she didn't know where she was going to end up.
The painting had been framed and put up in his office after about a month; he couldn't decide between that and his bedroom for a while, but ultimately figured out that it fit better in the KC building, Kiseki's idol. Work had slowed down a little bit, so he was able to go home earlier and use his laptop to search for her, but it was proving difficult. He thought that "Akai" would be a really easy name to find, considering it was Japanese and therefore rare in an English country, but he forgot the US was a melting pot. The Akais that did show up did not have Takai or Korosu as first names, so it was a dead end.
He was able to find out what company Mr. Akai had been working for, however. He had pressed the landlord for any information about the family, and after a little bribe, he was able to get a little bit out of him. The name was Wabash and Gregg, a company that took care of insurance claims, mainly for small businesses. This was how far he had managed to get in between school, work, and his own thoughts.
Sometimes Kiseki wasn't even on his mind once he had it set on a stepping stone to find her.
Tonight he was taking a look again at the company's website. There was a small section about their foreign department, but only two employees were listed as the main travelers on the main page: Brad Hoffman and Garrett Messinger. There was no place to search the employee list, so that left him no choice but to hack the files. He made it into the manager's list, but still couldn't find any sign of Akai anywhere.
Maybe he was fired…? Seto thought for a moment. Or maybe he left the company after the accident. Even if he was on leave, he should be back on his feet by now, and they wouldn't just kick him off unless he left.
He folded his hands in his lap and pondered, panic briefly flitting through his stomach. There was something he was overlooking, he knew it. He got up to get himself some food to give him some time to think about it. If Korosu Akai had left the company, there was very little hope that he could find Kiseki. The best he could hope for would be to wait until she turned 18, then to look her up as a legal citizen. He hoped he wouldn't have to wait that long.
With a heavy sigh, he sank into his leather seat again in front of his computer. His blue eyes stared blankly at the monitor, and he ran a hand through his brown hair. I might as well search all the names manually; I don't know what else to do. The thought of doing this made him groan, but if this tedious task would lead him to the girl he loved, he would do it for days if he had to.
He figured the first place to start would be the foreign department. Looking at the list of employees, he saw a few non English names, but none came even close to Japanese. His search continued for an hour or two before he decided it would be best he went to bed empty-handed.
The next few weeks produced no more information, and Seto was reaching the end of his patience. He climbed into bed again and laid on his back with his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling. Mind wandering, he didn't think he could look at another name without throwing up. That and he still felt as if there was something big he wasn't thinking about. He decided to focus on what that might be, since everything else he'd thought of yielded nothing useful.
Obviously, there was always the possibility that Mr. Akai had left the company, and he couldn't do anything about that. However, companies usually keep records of past employees, and he couldn't find his name in the previous employee files, so if he did leave, they might have lost his file. However, it made him suspicious, and made it more likely that Akai was still with them somehow.
Akai… The name was definitely Japanese. He could try looking them up in the Japanese directory, but that would take an extremely long time, and he seriously doubted that they would have someone listed if they were only there a week. He had never seen Kiseki's parents in person, so he couldn't simply look at the profile pictures of the employees and do a facial recognition…
Seto's teeth began to grind slightly; his hopes were slowly slipping away. He knew so little that he felt like giving up right then and there. The name Akai Kiseki would simply remain in his mind forever and burn a hole into it.
Akai Kiseki. Seto rolled over. He wondered vaguely how someone could have such a beautiful Japanese name and not even be Japanese. Wait a minute…why would someone have a fully Japanese name if she weren't Japanese?
Kaiba sat up suddenly. Of course.
Throwing his bed sheets off, he turned his computer back on, tapping his fingers quickly on the desk as it whirred to life. Hacking back into Wabash and Gregg, his fingers typed so fast that he kept missing keys; he hoped beyond all reason that his sudden thought would be what he was looking for. He took another look at the foreign affairs list of employees. He had to look at their profiles separately, so he started with Brad Hoffman. It showed a list of all his assignments; Seto's eyes darted from side to side as he went further back to May of that year. Seto saw the beginning of the best piece of news he had seen in a long while: DOMINO, JAPAN.
The date on the trip was May 18 through July 24, and his heart sank slightly. Kiseki's family had only been there for a week in May. Her birthday was May 14, one day before she had been cruelly taken away from him. He tried to slow his heartbeat as he clicked on the next employee, Garrett Messinger. Seto's eyes went wide.
DOMINO, JAPAN. May 7—May 15. Business transaction terminated due to back injury during assignment.
Garrett Messinger certainly didn't sound anything like Korosu Akai, but that description sure did. It had the man's address, home telephone number, and address on it, and Seto copied and pasted it into a word file. If his hunch was correct, the family had been using an alias.
He was sure he'd found them. He'd found... her.