Hello, everyone, here is a story. I suggested this story would need an explanation in the description, and here it is:

I do not generally write pairing fic of any kind. However, this is supposed to end up being Jounouchi/Kaiba. I choose to do it this time around because a) I thought perhaps I should try doing it at least once, and b) because this particular pairing makes absolutely no sense to me. I know it's rather popular, but I personally have a very hard time imagining them feeling anything but hatred for each other. Thus, I am interested in trying to set up a scenario that would make it seem plausible to me. Because I'm approaching it from this perspective, though, anticipate any romance stuff taking a very long time to appear. I really don't know yet how it's going to happen, but I'm gonna try, dammit! It'll happen, I sweeeaaaar it too yoooou.

Even if it doesn't end up being a satisfactory romantic relationship, though, I hope it's interesting enough besides that you'll like it. Please enjoy.

Thursday

"Fucking damnit!" Jounouchi exclaims, clutching his assignment sheet so hard he almost tears it in half. "Why am I paired with that asshole?"

"That's some terrible luck, dude. On your side and his," Honda says, eyeing his own sheet with vague interest. Jounouchi snatches the page out of his hand and finds the names handwritten on the top in red ink – "Honda & Ohno." Ohno, while not a particularly interesting person, is basically a decent human being.

"You'll be able to work with him. I'm not gonna get this done if I have to do it with friggin' Kaiba!"

"Did you even notice that I insulted you?"

"Yes, I just chose to ignore it."

"Classy."

"I'm sure it won't be too hard," says Yugi, ever the optimist. "Kaiba's very serious about school. I'm sure he'll be willing to cooperate with you, for the sake of the project if nothing else."

Jounouchi crumples up Honda's assignment sheet and tosses it at his head. It hits him in the ear and falls to the floor. "Yeah, that's easy for you to say when you're partner is your best friend and a hot girl at the same time. My partner is an ugly boy and a stupid asshole," he says to Yugi. Poor naïve Yugi, so willing to see the good in everybody, doesn't understand that Kaiba is a horrible person and no one in their right mind could stand being around him for more than a minute or two, let alone for hours at a time. You'd think he would, what with all the time he's had to spend with him over the last few months.

"I'm really…don't say that so loud, she might have heard you," Yugi says, dropping his voice to a whisper and scanning his periphery with big nervous eyes.

"She's in the bathroom, she didn't hear nothin'."

"Well, someone else might have!"

"I doubt anyone's gonna bother telling her some offhand comment I made. Everybody says stuff like that without it meaning anything."

"Hey Anzu, Jounouchi wants to have sex with you!" Honda says, waving behind his shoulder. Jounouchi and Yugi strain their necks turning too quickly too look at the door, ready to run away from a furious Anzu who turns out to not be there at all. They sigh together and look back at Honda and find him clutching his sides and laughing his head off.

"Why am I friends with you again?" Jounouchi asks. He throws another balled up piece of paper at his face. This one hits him in the forehead.

"Holy crap, Honda! That really scared me," says Yugi.

"Sorry, Yugi, I was only trying to scare him," Honda says, throwing the paper ball back at Jounouchi. It misses completely and rolls under a desk in the back of the room.

"If you're not already in your group, you should get up and meet with them!" the teacher yells from behind her desk. "I told you to do this five minutes ago!"

"Ugh, I should go," Honda gathers his stuff and carries it to the other side of the room where Ohno sits at his desk reading a magazine. He has to wait for the person sitting in the desk he wants to pick up all their crap, which is strewn haphazardly across three studentless desks, and leave before he can sit down. In the mean time he and Jounouchi exchange stupid faces from across the room.

"You should get in your group too," Yugi suggests.

"I'm not going to him. He should come here," Jounouchi responds, pouting and shoving his fists in his pockets.

"I'm sure it won't be that bad."

"What's not gonna be bad?" Anzu, returning from the bathroom, asks. She sits in her desk and reads the assignment sheet for the first time, scowling as her eyes reach the bottom of the page. "Why are we getting a new project on a Thursday? That's totally arbitrary."

"Jounouchi's assigned to work with Kaiba."

"Ha! Good luck with that," she says without looking up, twirling a pen in her fingers.

"Luck's not gonna be good enough," Jounouchi grumbles.

Suddenly a shadow descends upon his desk. Startled, he jerks to attention, expecting either the teacher or Kaiba to be looming over his head, scrutinizing him for one of those things they're always scrutinizing him for. It's Otogi – not his first choice, but certainly preferable to what he expected. "Hey man, what's up," he says.

"Hey. Bakura's not here, right?" Otogi asks. He has a dice in his hand and he's rolling it around delicately in his palm. Half the time the dice isn't visible beneath his fingers, though, so it just looks like he's continuously scratching himself.

"No. Why, you his partner?"

"Yeah, but I guess that doesn't matter right now. You know where he is?"

"Yesterday he said he felt kinda sick at like, the end of the day."

"That sucks, I hope it's not anything serious."

"Probably not."

"Ugh, well it's just as well that I'd be paired with a sick person. I mean, it's worse for him, obviously, but it's still inconvenient, you know?"

"Even if he's sick for the next two months, you're probably gonna get more done with him than I am with Kaiba."

"You could stop whining about it any minute now," Anzu says with a roll of her eyes. Both Yugi and Otogi think this is funny for some reason, and they giggle, the latter more blatantly than the former.

Otogi catches the dice between his index and middle fingers and starts rolling it along his knuckles. "Kaiba? I had to do a project with him in physics once. First 100 percent I ever got in that class," he says.

"Yeah, he'd let you work with him, he doesn't hate you for no reason," Jounouchi groans, refusing to let go of his disappointment.

"I'd say I have plenty of reasons to hate you," Kaiba says, storming over from the front of the room to interrupt their conversation. He stops short at Jounouchi's desk, in exactly the spot Otogi had just been in before he swept nimbly over to the side to avoid being collided into. Cold fury burns in his eyes. Jounouchi raises his fists to his face, bracing himself for whatever's coming. Yugi and Anzu tense up, ready to stop their friend should he try to start a fight. Kaiba raises his hand and beckons for Jounouchi to follow him with two fingers. "Come with me."

Confused, Jounouchi glances at his friends, looking for help. They all seem just as confused as he is, shaking their heads and shrugging and mouthing "I don't know"s and "don't punch him"s. Kaiba waits with his arms firmly at his sides and his eyes locked on Jounouchi's face. He lets thirty seconds pass, then claps his hands twice and says "Come."

"Oh come on, that was unnecessary," Anzu says, hearing Jounouchi's chair scrape against the floor and throwing her arm in front of him. "Tell him what you want, don't be rude for no reason."

"Get your lazy ass out of your chair and help me convince Mrs. Maeda to change our assignment," he barks. Jounouchi, reeling from the indignity he is suffering, joins Kaiba reluctantly despite their shared goal. He mumbles a few expletives and slumps over to the teacher's desk.

Mrs. Maeda has her face so close to the table that the two students in front of her can only see the back of her head. Whatever she is reading is only visible to her; only an inch of it is visible past her forehead, and the rest is hidden by her head and her hair. Her right hand scribbles chicken scratches all over a sheet of loose leaf that she most definitely cannot see. It is completely beyond Jounouchi how, despite her complete absorption in what she's doing, she knows she's been approached.

"I already told you, I'm not letting you exchange your partner," she says, her voice slightly muffled by her own face. Kaiba opens his mouth to speak, but doesn't manage to get a word out before Maeda lifts her head and slams her fist down like a gavel. "Don't argue!" she shouts against the metallic wobbling of the desk. "I don't have time to deal with accommodating for every student's petty personal problems! I've got a job to do, I am busy!"

Kaiba sighs, flexes his fingers, and delivers his words in a deliberate calm. "With all due respect, I have a significant amount of work to do myself, probably more than you do, and I don't have time to waste performing an impossible task. I will do this with literally anyone else. I know for a fact that I could do this project twice alone faster than I can do it once with him."

Jounouchi looks up at Kaiba in mild admiration, impressed that he could so easily contradict and insult the teacher while still sounding polite. He wants to back him up somehow, and he has plenty to add no doubt, but the look on Maeda's face shuts him up before he can even try to speak. Uninhibited rage seeps from her pores like sweat. Her teeth grind loud enough for him to hear it through her closed lips. Her eyebrow twitches. Jounouchi is intimidated, but Kaiba is unaffected, even though all of this anger is entirely directed at him.

"I have something else I want to talk to you about after class," she tells him. Her tone is one best likened to the tone many an acquaintance of Jounouchi's has used to challenge him to fights after school. "This conversation is over. Permanently. Unless Jounouchi has something revelatory to say, both of you return to your seats, now."

Jounouchi waves his hands and shakes his head. "No, nothing, sorry to bother you," he says. He adds a nervous laugh that, instead of helping to diffuse the situation, earns him nothing but a sharp glare from Kaiba and a "Good. Sit down," from Maeda. Jounouchi obeys without hesitation, and baffles over Kaiba's reluctance to do the same. He returns to his seat, sits in it, and sighs the most relieved sigh he has in months. His friends, and in fact everyone in the room is likely to have overheard that conversation, as evidenced by Anzu, Yugi and Otogi's bewildered stares. Honda gapes at him from across the room in amazement. No one has ever seen this teacher lose her shit like that.

"Guys?" Jounouchi says, "I think I'm okay with working with Kaiba."

There you are, chapter one. I hope you liked it. If you have anything to say, go right ahead and leave me a comment, review, opinion, anything. If not, then be on your merry way, and may your journey be uninterrupted.