Did you know that there was some Confederate guy in the American Civil War named Joseph Wheeler? My brother pointed this out to me when he was going his Civil War project. Now I blame Jounouchi for the Confederates losing. He does something on TV that is stupid, I point and yell, "Jounouchi-kun, you lost the Civil War!"
Sh-t munky, I'm on chapter 7? Where has my life gone? I was supposed to start planning a Shinigami costume so I can cosplay as Rukia (Bleach)! But I feel bad, because I was sitting there, like, 'I really don't want to work on this.' I've really got to learn: if I decide to screw with characters' existences, I have to carry it through to the end.
Shadowwaker-san: Nope, I have no clue what I'm doing. I could just end it here. But then I might die. I don't want to die either. At least, not now. I promised my invisible friend that I would graduate from college.
Ai Baka-san Austra: Nope, you don't creep me out one bit! And actually, this is my first time writing it slowly, really. I looked at the big picture and realized: wow, I'm dragging it out. I guess that's a good thing… maybe. And I think that this fic will be sex-less. Kami-sama knows I don't need to read anymore of that, let alone write it.
Who knows… I may leave this one-sided. I will note that I never know what is going to happen when I start a fic. That may be why I hardly finish. But hopefully this one, since I have devoted so much time to it, will eventually have an end.
Chapter 7
Empty
"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth."
—Henry David Thoreau
Thursday
It was one in the afternoon when the bus came. We were waiting for it in town. Namakura-san and the American siblings said goodbye to us, some tearfully. I think Conner-san and Mokuba-kun traded emails earlier in the day (Or, as I heard it, Conner-san gave him Courtney-san's email, since he had none of his own.).
The Kaiba brothers were already gone. They left half an hour earlier in a taxi that would take them to the closest airport so that they would not have to ride the bus all day. Sometimes life just was not fair.
My lip was still hurting. I think it got a little swollen. I would have to explain it to Anzu-chan, who would probably go yell at Kaiba-kun for being involved. Or just existing—I felt like doing that right about now. No, no. I was not that screwed up. Well, at times perhaps, but not now.
The bus pulled up. Haga-kun and Ryuuzaki-kun were the first ones on from our group, after bowing and saying thank you to Namakura-san. Duelists from other towns on the same route piled on one by one.
"Come on, we have to get good seats!" Jounouchi-kun flew on. Yuugi-kun and Honda-kun bowed before following him. I bowed as well and smiled.
"Thank you."
"You're welcome, Bakura-kun." She bowed and I loaded myself onto the bus as well. I sat on the row with Yuugi-kun as I did on the way up, but this time, the scenery would by backwards. Perhaps my emotions would be a little backwards as well. When I came, I wanted to come, but I also wanted to go to the comfort of home. I guess that still applied—I was happy to be going home because I was tired and I needed my asylum.
On the way here, I had nothing to really look forward to, either positive or negative. On this venture, however, I had to look forward to seeing Kaiba-kun tomorrow in school. I had to look forward to remembering. I had to look forward to looking backward, and not really forward at all.
I used to say that I did not dwell on the past so much, as with the Amane thing. I let those things make me dispassionate. This thing with Kaiba-kun, however, made me feel so many different emotions that it was confusing.
I wondered what, and when, the first thing I would say to Kaiba-kun would be after we came back. I did not normally talk to him, unless there was a tournament or assignment, so I could very well not speak to him for the rest of the school year (and, at that, high school), if I was lucky. Lately, I had come to doubt my luck, however.
I pulled out my Thoreau book and thanked anyone that I was not prone to carsickness. We would have something on this tomorrow, probably a test, so I decided that perhaps reading was the best thing to do. Honda-kun seemed to decide the same, and, seeing as he had the same copy as me, he was not far along.
Yuugi-kun and Jounouchi-kun talked, which gave an eerie sense of normality, considering how odd everything had been over the past few days around me and concerning Kaiba-kun. Was I coming out of the rabbit hole?
Knowing my recent luck, no. This was just a little bit of calm before it got worse. The divine scriptwriter was really screwing with me.
I read the whole way home, stopping once for a bathroom break when the bus did and pausing for a few moments to breath. I was a few pages from finished when the others started dragging their things together to get off. We were in Domino city limits. It was dark outside, the streetlights and buildings being the only mentionable light. There were the stars, but the stars had already caused me enough trouble for the week, namely one incident which I hoped desperately to forget.
Then again, as long as a person thinks of something, they will never forget it. Theoretically, at least. There are always exceptions.
I began to speed-read the last pages, hoping to finish them. I noticed that I was better at reading English when I did not think so much about it, probably because my brain was focusing so hard to keep off unwanted ideas.
I would be going back to school tomorrow. How much had I changed? A little too much for my tastes, and yet, physically, I was still the same person, just with a messed up lip. But that was not too much of a change, I supposed. Not enough to mention. Now, if I had changed sex or species that would be worth noticing.
I should stop trying to joke. I was not in the mood.
We got to the stop and the bus slowed down jerkily. I almost did not want to get off, despite that it was still the bus driver that did not like me. But I felt that way possibly because when I got off, I would be stepping back into the world that I had known and the world that was, well, normal. The normalcy was odd and more than a little confusing.
As I hefted by carry-on bag on my shoulder and stepped off of that bus, ignoring the staring bus driver, and into the world of the normal, I felt so empty.
Friday
The next day at school was a little sluggish, mostly because se we just returned from almost an entire week of vacation.
The first thing I noticed when I sat down was that Kaiba-kun was not there. Perhaps he was at work. I did not want to think about it.
Anzu-chan asked us about how the trip was. She told us about her family and how different Tokyo was from Domino. In all, she had a good time. I was a little jealous. We told her a brief lie about my lip and she was angry at the absent Kaiba-kun.
The teachers did not want to be there, as was obviously noticed. The students really did not want to be there. We did not really do too much in class besides read aloud, except in English. He assigned us homework. It was a paired assignment to write a research paper about another instance in history when civil disobedience was displayed in order to better society. The teacher got this idea from his study abroad in America when he was younger. I just wanted to strangle whoever originally came up with the idea. After all, we had to write it in English.
Pairs were to be chosen by use of the ladder game. (1) I hated that game.
Yuugi-tachi all had random partners. I hoped that Yuugi-kun, Jounouchi-kun, and Honda-kun's partners read the whole thing through.
"Bakura-kun," Kawakami-sensei called me. I prayed to whatever god that I would have a partner who was good at English. I should have known that the second part of the storm is worse than the beginning. "You are paired with Kaiba-kun."
I wanted to cry. Yuugi-kun, Jounouchi-kun, and especially Honda-kun stared at me. The fact that I had been chosen to partner with him was so normal that I could not refuse without seeming abnormal. After all, someone had to be his partner, so why not me? So I wasn't that surprised, despite the intense urge to cry at the inevitable.
I hated the ladder game.
"Bakura-kun," Kawakami-sensei called my over. He was a skinny, feminine teacher, which made me wonder if he was some secret descendant of Kawakami Gensai, the samurai. (2) The kanji of their names were different, but who knows? He was one of the few people I remembered from history.
"Yes, sir?" I stopped at his desk as he put some papers into a manila folder.
"Since you are Kaiba-kun's partner and he is absent today," yes, my life is centered around Kaiba-kun now, is it not? "Could you possibly drop his schoolwork assignments at his house?"
"Sure." I took the folder, which contained notes of what pages to do in which workbooks. If Kaiba-kun did not have his books at home, too bad for him, I guessed.
Looking back, it surprised me how calmly I reacted. I went without argument, though it would have been selfish to argue with the teacher, since he had absolutely nothing to do with the DM tournament and I did not think he was in Kyoto at the time.
My lack of emotions scared me. The easiness to look at the situation with such cynical logic made me feel empty.
Kaiba-kun's house was not too much of a detour from my own, nor did I have any real reason to go home, aside from school regulation. I enjoyed walking usually, so I did not mind passing the turn that I would normally make to go home. As long as I did not think, I would not feel fearful emotion. As long as I did not think, I would not feel. That was the mantra which I had to repeat to myself.
The first bit of nervousness came when I came up to the front gate. The place was huge, something I had expected, but not on that magnitude! It could fit several of my apartment complexes on the grounds that I could see alone!
Life was really unfair.
It was not that I wanted all of that room to myself, though. I mean, that would be far too lonely, especially for someone living completely alone, such as myself. The Kaiba brothers had servants and whatnot, I knew. But you could still use a lot of that land to build residences for other people, if you really wanted to. My thoughts, at least. I would not voice them to anyone anytime soon.
I was contemplating whether or not I should push the call button and wait, or to push the call button, leave the stuff, and run. I did not need to see Kaiba-kun, really. The sweat on the back of my neck and the flushed feeling proved that. I was starting to feel uncomfortable.
Now I was contemplating whether or not to even push the call button. I could just leave the work there and run away. Someone would find it eventually. But no, then I would be failing Kawakami-sensei. He would call upon the soul of his possible ancestor and slice me into little bits, or at least scare the crap out of me, since he seemed far too nice to actually do anything.
"Bakura-kun?"
I jumped. I swear, I jumped when that voice called my name. I may have also let out some sort of noise, because Mokuba-kun was staring at me at an even greater degree than one usually gets from just jumping.
"What are you doing here?" The young boy asked, continuing his innocent interrogation. Of course one would ask why someone was suspiciously hanging in front of their house, especially if they knew that the person waiting had a recent fight with a prominent member of the household. Who knows, I may have been there to kill Kaiba-kun.
Very unlikely. I probably could not even win against Yuugi-kun in a match of strength. I had very weak upper body strength. In fact, it probably barely registered in Kaiba-kun's head that I had slapped him.
Kami-sama, I slapped him like a girl. There went my self-esteem.
"I'm here to drop off Kaiba-kun's school assignments."
"You got drafted?" He gave me a look that told me that he knew that I was not really here with my will.
I nodded. "And I also was assigned to work on an English project with him."
"That book?"
Again, I nodded. I finished it last night, luckily.
"Well, come in." He took out a card key (card key!) and unlocked the gate. It slid open easily and he led me in.
Did I really want to go in? Not really.
"Kaiba-kun was absent today," I commented as we reached the front door. I'm sure that I sounded intelligent.
"Yeah," Mokuba-kun opened the door, "he worked himself to exhaustion last night with the company. He decided to stay home and finish that book."
So, even Kaiba-kun has his limits. What do you know, he was human.
"Nii-sama, I'm home!" He called out loud as he shut the door. "Bakura-kun's here with your missed schoolwork as well!"
I expected some sort of dramatic entrance, something that Kaiba-kun usually did. However, he just walked down the stairs, came around, and stared at us for a few moments. Actually, I'm pretty sure that he was staring at me. I was the intruder, after all.
"Hello, Kaiba-kun." I bowed with the bit of composure that I could muster. "Um, Kawakami-sensei gave me your work assignments," should I approach him to give them to him? "And we have been assigned to work together on an English project."
He came towards me. I wanted to hide. I felt filled with emotions, but none of them seemingly positive. It was mostly the urge to pretend that I never existed. I was stupidly holding up the folder that Kawakami-sensei gave me. Kaiba-kun took it, not once breaking eye contact with me.
"The project is an essay," I continued, "a research paper in English about another instance of civil disobedience."
"So we have to work together on this," he stated to himself. I only nodded in reply, not trusting my voice to answer that. Ah, why was I getting so nervous? So long as Mokuba-kun was here, Kaiba-kun would not try anything, would he? I broke the eye contact and felt a little better. I may have shown myself as submissive, but that was the truth, was it not?
"I-if you're busy," I stuttered, "I can do most of the research and we can type it up at a later time."
"When is it due?"
"Next Saturday."
Kaiba-kun made an unhappy sound. It was not a funny one, like some people say that the sounds that I make can be. It was an annoyed sound that, yes, made me want to run and hide. Imagine that. He looked as if he were thinking. "Come over Sunday afternoon around one. We can discuss the subject then."
It was not a question of whether or not I could come over then, but a command telling me to do so. What would he have done if I already had plans with, say, my family? He probably would have killed me. Then again, I did tell him that I lived alone. That may have opened my schedule just a little bit.
I just nodded in reply to that. I had no excuse to disagree. "I need to go home, now." I did not move, however, until someone gave me permission. If I moved, I felt that I would have died. I really felt as if I was walking on thin ice. It gave me that nervous nausea in my stomach that you get when you experience something unpleasant. It was so completely different than what Kaiba-kun made me experience two days ago, even. Was it only two days ago? It seemed like so much longer. But no, two days ago was when the tournament ended and the night when he kissed me. Two days. So much changed in two days.
How much would I change by the time this project ended? I had planned to stay away from Kaiba-kun at all costs, but now I was shoved with him in this and with no way to escape. Did anyone care what I wanted? It seemed so unfair that this would happen right after what previously transpired. And how did Kaiba-kun feel about this? I could not tell, besides some annoyance. Then again, it would also depend on what exactly he was feeling and thinking when he kissed me.
I wondered if I could switch partners.
"I'll let you out, Bakura-kun." Mokuba-kun interrupted my three-second mental trip. He opened the door and waited for me.
"Thank you." Turning to Kaiba-kun, I forced a smile. "Good bye." I followed him out and away from the house, away from Kaiba-kun, who did not say a word of good byes.
As I thought may happen, Mokuba-kun slowed his pace and started speaking as soon as we were out of hearing from the house. "This is a little ironic, isn't it?" He asked me. I nodded in reply. "I hope you and nii-sama don't fight during this. Maybe you two can become friends again."
"Mokuba-kun," I asked suddenly, not knowing exactly why, but knowing that an answer may help my wonder, "has Kaiba-kun ever spoken about me in your presence?" Maybe Kaiba-kun told him something that, while seeming innocent to him, could mean something to me.
Mokuba-kun shook his head. "The only time he really spoke to me concerning you was when I asked him about why you two had a fight."
"And what did he reply?"
"He said that he did something stupid."
My emotions concerning Kaiba-kun change a lot. I know that I had promised to myself to never think about him again, no matter how impossible such a notion could be, but now I was thrust back into a world where he existed as a prominent part of my life.
The said blue-eyed antagonist of my life was all that I could think about that evening as I made dinner for myself. I almost cut myself while slicing vegetables. I could not keep my mind on what I was doing. My thoughts were going back to Kaiba-kun.
Perhaps I did overreact when I hit him. It did not seem like it at the time, in the heat of things, but maybe I did. Just maybe, though.
How did I feel about him at this time? I did not know. I felt a hollow resonance within myself. It felt like I was an empty canister or something. Kaiba-kun filled me with emotions that seemed to change with the days. Not even a week ago, I arrived in Kyoto and had a conversation with him about Thoreau and personal views on government. His responses made me feel so many different things at once. Since, my emotions were like random jumps on some field of a spectrum without rhyme or reason. I was afraid of him, then calmed, and then I felt that I liked him. He made me feel happy. He made we wonder my loyalties, and I may have chosen my side before that incident occurred. Then I was angry. Now, now I was something else. I did not know exactly what it was. This was a feeling that was not tangible. I could not name it. It just made me hurt, and not in the same way that I did when I liked Kaiba-kun.
Did I still like him? In this cooled moment when I could look at myself critically, perhaps I still did somewhere in my heart. Then again, my heart may as well have been run through a blender, so emotions were getting rather difficult to figure out.
Did Kaiba-kun ever have emotional trips like this? No, even while knowing that he did have emotions, he was too sure of himself. I think that I have said that before.
'He said that he did something stupid.' Mokuba-kun said this to me.
Did Kaiba-kun regret doing that to me? Whether or not he did, I could not gauge my reaction. If I could stand it, I would ask him to answer my questions. I needed to know that answer to that question: why? It was the question that plagued me the most for the past two days.
I would see Kaiba-kun in school the next day and all would seem normal to the populace, but Yuugi-tachi would still worry, Honda-kun would still know, and I would still feel this hollow emptiness.
Now I should lower the heat on the stove, or the water will boil over.
Saturday
I did not like math. I was sitting there in the math class, tapping my pencil almost noiselessly against my notes. English and math I disliked—gym as well. Along with being stereotypically feminine, I also had bad experiences with the former gym teacher when I first moved here.
Math was, well, math. I did not like the numbers and symbols, let alone putting them into equations. Algebra I could do. It was when we started getting into Geometry that I started disliking the subject, and I grasped a firm stance when we began Calculus and Trigonometry.
Surprisingly enough, if Jounouchi-kun really wanted to, he could get math. I got to hear the verbal signs of his mental epiphany of understanding as he began working practice problem three ahead of the teacher, who was slowly explaining for the slow learners, such as my self.
And of course, Yuugi-kun, Anzu-chan, and Honda-kun got it. I at one time had thought of asking for tutoring, but for some reason, some end of the world disaster kept occurring, and after all of that was said and done, I just did not want help anymore. Maybe I was just stubborn.
And then there was Kaiba-kun, a mathematical genius.
Math was the class right before English, so the brain got to do a complete turn-around in thinking-style. Luckily, the transition was not too difficult for me because I tended to not think in math. I had the odd feeling that I would not to terribly well on my midterm.
Kawakami-sensei talked a little more on the project, but more on what Thoreau meant to do, what it affected, and what it inspired. I was assuming that this was done when he studied in America because in past years with different teachers, we did not analyze the works so much. We analyzed in Japanese Literature, the books that we could actually read without a dictionary on hand.
My life must have seemed so drab and unimportant. That was how my life usually was, however. I was a person who hardly ever had excitement in his normal life, and when something did happen, it usually ended up in death. That was not a warm fuzzy. So I apologize to anyone who may be bored spying on my life, but this petty normality was what I lived. I liked this normality, even after tasting the new and awkward.
Then again, I could blame you, since you are the one stalking me.
"Bakura-kun, I've been meaning to ask you," Kawakami-sensei called me over, "about what happened to your lip." He was staring at the healing cut with concern. What lie could I give to a teacher?
"I got in a fight over break."
"Now that seems unlike you," he frowned at me. "Should I let you talk to a counselor or the nurse?" He was worried, and I guessed that was what teachers did.
I shook my head. "No, that's alright."
"Who did you fight with?"
I did not want to lie to my teacher. He was asking out of actual concern. "Kaiba-kun."
He winced. "So the picking of partners came up badly for you, huh?" He stared at me. "Do you think that something will happen? I can change the groupings."
This was my way out. This was what I had been waiting for since he first named the pairs, and since before. This was my chance to get Kaiba-kun out of my life and put me in a safe zone in which I did not have to deal with the past in Kyoto. I could finally put that behind me and move on.
Then why did I refuse?
I shook my head. "No, Kawakami-sensei, I could not ask you to do that."
"And why not?"
"Because I need to get over it."
He laughed. "That was a mature answer, Bakura-kun." He seemed more like a college student than a teacher. He was fairly young, I supposed, but indeed old enough to have graduated from a university. "How would you like to go get some tea? I could drive you home afterwards."
The prospect of tea with a person I was starting to feel that I could talk to was nice. Especially if that person was not a stoic moving statue most of the time. I nodded in reply. "That would be nice."
Usually, I would wonder about the person's intentions, but this person seemed so warm that the idea that he may try something was horrible in my head. And he did not try anything, not anything that whole time.
I sat in the car and stared around. I would not say that it was the first time that I had been in a person's car, but it was one of the few, since so few people in Japan own cars. That was because there were so many people in such a small space, the same reasons for homes being built up, rather than out. People lived in apartments and not separate houses, usually. The exceptions were older houses built before this present era, like Namakura-san's.
We got out of the car and entered a café that I recognized from my walks home. It was a nice place, though I had not gone inside of it before. It smelled of pastry, coffee, and tea. I ordered some mint tea, since I had wanted to try some, but never really found the chance. Kawakami-sensei ordered coffee.
"I picked up drinking this stuff in America." He indicated the strong-smelling, hot liquid. "It kept me awake long enough to finish my assignments."
Some girls were staring at us, both older ones and ones wearing our school's uniform. I supposed that you could call Kawakami-sensei pretty. He had that reddish-tinted hair that Japanese people sometimes get and narrow black eyes. He looked oddly cool with it, and yet carried it off without much apparent care.
Then there was me, a skinny girlish high school student with white hair and brown eyes. What odd tea-drinking friends we must have seemed.
"So, why did you fight with him?"
I set my cup down. I really could not lie to him now, since he just bought the tea, his treat. I felt bad. "It's complicated."
"Bakura-kun, I think I've handled complicated before."
I sighed. "Fine," I tried to gain a bit of strength. The tea and coffee smells felt a little intoxicating. "To make it short: he was unnaturally kind, I liked him, he kissed me, I asked about it, he didn't answer, I got angry and slapped him, and he hit me back." I touched the cut. It didn't sting, but it still felt weird. I did not want to see Kawakami-sensei's face while he processed it all, especially the 'I liked him' part.
"Hm," my face shot back up to see him smiling simply, "that's not too complicated, though I guess for someone so young, it would seem as such." He sat back and looked off out the window, probably at the same nothing that I had a tendency to stare at. "When my boyfriend and I met, he was Catholic and convinced that he was straight, so we had to go through that whole fiasco. His parents found out after we had slept together, disowned him, and then came my family." He smiled. "They were easier to deal with. It was just the 'I'm disappointed with you, but I guess I'll support you' speech."
Only one thought could actually come out of my mouth. "You're gay?"
"Yep, so I guess no one has to worry when those girls confess to me. Plus, they're students, so I couldn't touch them anyway, even if I did like them."
I didn't know why, but it seemed strange for him to be gay. I supposed that I just never thought about it. If I did, maybe it would be a little more apparent. Or maybe it would if I signed up for the premium membership and got the damn gay-dar.
"So, are you done?"
I looked at my cup and found it empty. "Yeah, I guess so." We stood and threw our cups away before getting back in the car. I directed Kawakami-sensei to my apartment complex.
"Thanks for the tea," I said to him as I got out.
"Bakura-kun," he was still smiling, "I won't tell anyone, so don't worry."
I smiled in return. "Thanks for that, and for being concerned."
"I'm your teacher, I have to care," happy-maniacal teenage gleam to his eyes, "see you."
I closed the door and he drove off. I smiled as he did before walking up the stairs, fishing out the key, and returning to my asylum. But now, it did not seem so bad.
Notes and Translations:
(1) Ladder game… I'm really not sure how it works, but it's a way of randomly choosing things in which a group of names is written in a line on top and lines are drawn straight down. More names or subjects are written on the other end of the line. Between those lines, perpendicular lines are drawn. The names are covered. There is some method or sort to drawing down those lines, switching lines on the perpendiculars, etc. I just don't know it.
(2) Kawakami Gensai was a very pretty samurai from the Meiji era. He was sometimes mistaken for a woman at first glance. He was also the samurai that Himura Kenshin (Rurouni Kenshin) was based on.
I'm proud to say that I am typing some of this on my college campus (University of Houston main) because all the other freshmen are registering for classes, which I already did online. I'm just sitting in a café among actual older college students and a few freshmen… it's pretty cool, really. Though I will probably die when the school year starts up, because it is recommended to have about 12 hours of classes a week, and… I have more. A good amount more. I shall commit seppuku before the year is out.
Wait, Chik-fila is open NOW! I just stuck with Wendy's and now that's open? Damn you all! --glares-- Stupid French fries. --is not normally a fan of fast food--
And… another bit of this is being typed in my room, which had been used as a guest bedroom for my grandmother for the past week or so. So this is the first time I've been in my room with my laptop. Odd feeling, it is.
I taste cold medicine. Grape-flavored. --squick--
Typing at midnight is fun!
