Disclaimer/Notes: I do not own Yu-Gi-Oh!: GX, or any of the characters mentioned here. They belong to Kazuki Takahashi, and no money is being made off of this piece of fiction. This story was written solely for entertainment purposes, and no copyright infringement was intended. Please, do not sue. All original ideas are original (duh) and belong to me, unless otherwise mentioned. This story is unbeta'd, but otherwise needs no warnings. Enjoy.
The Mathematics of Forgetting
He did not have many friends. There was only a closely guarded handful of fellow students at the academy that he could talk to without receiving glares and sneers for his natural high-handedness, that socially awkward tendency of the brilliant toward the perception of arrogance. But he was not arrogant. He did not try to beat people with his own intelligence, to pound it in that he was smarter, better, stronger than they were. Still, he could not speak without sounding like he was making scientific speeches, could not make idle small talk about the matches he watched without coming across like he was trying to give a lecture on Duel theory. That kind of talk usually annoyed kids his age.
So, for the most part, he was used to being left to his own devices. It was really for the best, he thought. He was a fan of physics and quantum mechanics, had a thing for hard sciences. He liked geometry, and chemistry, and geology; there was something special about magnetism and the study of minerals for him after his freshman year, though he tried not to bring it up in conversation. Chaos theory and calculus, advanced trigonometry and 3D mathematics, kept him occupied when he had too much time to spare. His calculations could be seen scrawled down the margins of every page in his notebook, with some equations working themselves out along his desktop and onto the walls in his old dorm room in Ra Yellow. The boy who used to share that room with him hated it when he covered the walls with ink and speculation.
He played baseball and collectible card games, and was good at both. His decks were based on statistics and abstract formulas, carefully kept in dark cases according to elemental theme and strapped to the inside of his jacket so that they could not be lost or stolen. He worked out problems of angles and force on his bats before each game, as if to remind him just how the ball should be hit for a home-run. He knew the probability of each type of throw or draw, so that he was never too surprised when either came up.
But all of that seemed far away as he closed the book he had been reading, calloused fingers drumming along the cover for a moment before he opened it again. There was a pen in his other hand, and he tapped the capped end of it against the smudged paper of his notebook thoughtfully. He turned the page slowly, the corners of his mouth pulled down into a ponderous frown.
When had he ceased to be important to those few people who were important to him? At what point was it that they had all stopped being friends? No matter what formula he applied, Misawa could not determine what had acted as the catalyst for their falling out. Had it been something he said, something he did or failed to accomplish? Or was it simply the result of short attention spans and a summer that lasted far too long for his liking? He glanced down at the nearly illegible scribbling across his paper, but, for the life of him, could not find where he had gone wrong.
And so Misawa uncapped his pen, and went back to his formulas and calculations, determined to find the answer as to why it was that he was so easily forgotten.