Joey's Valentine Woes-Part 3
Thankfully for the blonde, Joey had managed to crawl back into his seat before his other classmates began to file into the room before the period started. He didn't want to have to explain as to why, exactly, he was lying on the ground by Kaiba's feet.
Some conversations you just know will never turn out well.
He couldn't believe his other Plan had failed him. It had been perfect! He had spent precious minutes, pushing his brain to the limit – which is kind of sad, in itself – only to be thwarted by the cruel whims of fate.
Now he was back to square one, and he could only draw up a blank.
Besides, the fact that thinking was currently making his brain throb painfully inside of his skull was probably not very conducive to his efforts. His head was sore all over from a combination of the beatings he had concurred throughout the day from the toilet bowl, the teacher's weapon of choice (the ruler of doom), and the desk that broke his fall some few minutes ago.
Joey decided that all three were now classified as 'Evil.'
Joey really should have paid attention to these bad omens – though if he had, perhaps things would have turned out differently - but Joey never really paid attention to much of anything, unless it involved Kaiba, food, Kaiba, Duel Monsters, or maybe Kaiba.
Besides, in Joey's mind, Kaiba was going to finally confess, so what possibly could go wrong?
If only he knew the answers to that question. If only.
A braver man might have thrown in the towel and would have decided that there were better ways to end one's life. Like being eaten alive. Or bleeding out through castration. Surely these would have been preferable to what Joey would subject himself to.
As the class progressed, the teacher passed back their latest exams. Joey barely had a chance to look at it before his eyes were assaulted by an army of angry red slashes across the paper. He gave a large groan, seeing so many of the answers marked as wrong.
The teacher looked down at the forlorn blonde with slight pity, and suggested getting tutoring. Joey's head snapped up. What a wonderful idea!
Joey nearly flew out of and over his desk and latched himself to Seto's arm. He had moved so quickly, one might have thought that he had teleported to his side. Joey donned his wide, lopsided, hopeful grin. He explained that the brunette would just love to help tutor him. Personally. Since he was, like, the smartest person in the whole wide world.
Apparently, as Joey found out a little too late, flattery does not get you everywhere.
Being the compassionate, sweet person that Kaiba is – and here, the readers can take a moment to laugh hysterically at the utter lie that is - he was kind enough to give the blonde a swift kick to the shin. Joey threw a punch in retaliation for his disgraced shin while hopping around in complete agony, but to no avail.
The blue-eyed teen sneered in Joey's direction, saying that it was impossible to teach a puppy even simple kindergarten knowledge.
Seto narrowed his eyes dangerously at Joey, wearing that sinister yet sexy smirk on his face, daring the blonde to disagree. Joey tried to glare back, but instead he looked more like the pouting puppy that Kaiba claimed him to be.
Joey wasn't sure if he'd rather strangle him for being such an ass, or ravish him completely just for looking so good.
Then he took another look at Kaiba's taunting smirk, feeling the waves of arrogance coming off of the brunette, and decided he felt himself leaning towards the former rather than the latter.
Joey felt himself burning from anger again. He normally was always so cheerful and carefree! How was it that Kaiba managed to always get under his skin? Why did he even like such a prat?
Then that annoying little voice in the back of his head answered his rhetorical question, saying that it was because Seto was sexy, smart, nice to you if you were Mokuba, and that his bastard side was a bit of a turn on.
Oh yeah. That's why.
Joey's eyes glazed over and got a faraway look in them, and he smiled dreamily up at Kaiba like the loony idiot that he is. Kaiba glanced almost worryingly at the blonde, who had started to drool slightly out of one corner of his mouth.
Joey was obviously not all there, and Kaiba wisely scooted his desk a couple of inches away in the opposite direction. Towards safety.
Joey pouted some more. Things really were not going according to the Plan today.
Joey tried to console himself by reasoning that Kaiba just had to back up a little bit to keep himself from jumping Joey in public. He was one sexy blonde after all, and the proximity was just probably too much for the CEO to handle. Yeah, that had to be it.
He grinned again, pleased with his irrational reasoning. That had to be the reason. Why else would the brunette back away? It had already been decided that Kaiba was hopelessly in love with Joey, so there could be no other explanation.
Joey nodded to himself. Yep. Made perfect sense.
Not one to be daunted by illogical rationalities or an increasingly irritated Kaiba, Joey trudged on in his quest to extract his confession from his One True Love.
All throughout class, Joey attempted to write little love poems to the taller teen – all mostly consisting of variations on the Roses are Red, Violets are Blue adage (Creative Writing was never really Joey's forte) - wadding them into paper balls and throwing them surreptitiously to Kaiba's desk. Because Joey's aim could only be described as atrocious, only a few of the notes actually made it to Kaiba. Needless to say, half of the class was pelted with Joey-Love-Note Bullets.
Apparently Kaiba had had quite enough of Joey's notes from the previous class, and did not want to look at anymore of the blonde's papers. He threw them right back without even bothering to open any of them. Unfortunately for the blonde, Kaiba's aim was much better, and had a lot more force behind them.
Having his rejected notes thrown back at his face probably wouldn't have been so bad if they hadn't hit him smack dab in the middle of his already tender and bruised forehead.
Jumping in sudden excruciating pain as his skin was brutally mauled was probably not a good idea when Joey had already been leaning his chair precariously backwards. His precious balance was ruined, and the hapless blonde tumbled to the floor.
Falling down to the ground – which was covered in questionable sticky, nasty things - wouldn't have been so bad either, if he hadn't been placed right next to the old, rickety bookshelf in the back of class that the teachers had probably not replaced in the last century. Sadly, the antique furniture did not seem to be able to withstand the blow, and crumbled into dust.
Now Joey had detention after school for destruction of school property. Personally, Joey thought he had done the school a public service. It was a death trap waiting to happen, waiting to attack some poor innocent student, much like himself.
Joey sighed forlornly at the idea of spending an hour of his precious Valentines' Day in an empty classroom writing lines of repentance for desecrating a supposedly historical part of the school. Come on. It was a bookshelf, for crying out loud!
Wait!
Maybe he could convince Seto to join him in detention and keep him company. You know, put that empty classroom to good use. And after they finished their hot, steamy session of man sex, Kaiba would offer to complete Joey's required lines of repentance for him. Just because Kaiba loved him that much.
As if hearing his thoughts, Kaiba swiveled around in his chair and sent an icy glare that promised unspeakable methods of slow and painful death in his direction.
On second thought, Joey thought hurriedly, Seto was a busy person – Joey was reasonably sure it took a lot of effort to be a top-class bastard - and probably had other things to do with his limited time then spend detention with his soon-to-be boyfriend.
Besides, they could have a whole romantic night ahead of them! Candlelit dinner, violin players in the background, Kaiba hand-feeding Joey and whispering sweet nothings in his ear…
Yeah, he could wait through an hour of detention for that. Or maybe just ditch it all together and face double detention the next day. It would all be worth it. Joey went back to day dreaming, drooling slightly as thoughts of Kaiba ran through his head.
After the bell rang and the class emptied out of the room, Joey walked through the halls trying to think of Plan C, seeing as he had spent most of the last hour thinking about what do to after plan C had succeeded.
Well, more like Plan C.5, if one were to count his efforts in the past class as half of a planned attempt.
Joey stopped in the middle of the hall and lifted his head. There, standing some ten feet in front of him was Kaiba, concentrating intently on opening his locker. He seemed to be having a hard time getting the lock to open. Joey felt himself grin impishly, watching the all-powerful CEO tugging futilely at the small piece of metal separating him from his school books.
Strangely, the thought that not everything was going perfect on the brunette on this day made Joey feel slightly happier with the world in general.
Then he frowned as he saw a pretty blonde girl walk up to Kaiba, nervously holding a Valentine out in offering to the brunette. Joey fumed in anger. What the hell! That girl was moving in on his One True Love! The nerve.
Fortunately for Joey, Kaiba barely spared a half glance at her, before turning a cold shoulder onto the poor girl. She dejectedly walked away, but behind her Joey could see a whole mob of girls bearing Valentines and chocolates. And Joey would bet his Red-Eyes Dragon that they all had Kaiba's name on it.
Something had to be done about this.
He was about to go over there and immediately mark Kaiba as his territory, in a way that involved a lot of ripping off of Kaiba's clothes and happy, slurpy kisses, when BAM! An idea assaulted Joey's brain.
Yes, yes! It just might work!
A manic, eager expression lit up his face. In fact, he was beginning to resemble Marik after finding innocent victims to subject to his Millennium Rod.
At seeing the blonde's face, the hallway quickly became devoid of anyone – Joey mentally congratulated himself on scaring away Kaiba's fan club – and soon it was only Joey and Kaiba, who had yet to succeed in opening his locker.
This was his chance! He would not waste it! He quickly devised a Plan C.
It was risky, and a rough, sketchy idea at best. It also had a fail rate of about 84.3%, but Lady Luck had to join his side sometime!
He took bounding leaps over to Seto, quickly closing the distance between them, with every intention of latching onto him, ripping off his clothes, and after a prolonged, heated make-out session, just telling him that yes, he would love to be his Valentine.
Genius.
The running over to his One True Love, however, was proving to be a difficult feat due to his throbbing shin that his self-proclaimed boyfriend-to-be had so thoughtfully given to him.
As the ten feet between them quickly diminished to eight, to five, to two, Joey was surprised that Kaiba hadn't seemed to notice yet. He didn't exactly have the grace of a leaping antelope, and he knew he was making quite a ruckus. Kaiba was either extremely deaf to the racket the blonde was making, or just really wanted whatever the hell was imprisoned in his locker.
At the last second however, Seto's locker finally decided to pop open, the door swinging right into the blonde's face and efficiently stopping him in his tracks.
Joey vaguely registered the feeling of his feet flying out from underneath him, and the weightlessness of being suspended in midair for a split second before gravity did its job and he came crashing back to the cold tile of the hallway below.
Seto looked over his shoulder surprised at the loud crash and resounding thump, and upon not immediately seeing anything, looked down. He was mildly startled to see Joey sprawled on the floor.
Normally, Kaiba would have just walked away. Some things you just know that you don't want to know. And he was certain that he had no desire to find out why Joey had assaulted his locker. And lost.
He really wouldn't have cared. But the blonde looked a bit dazed, sobbing about being thwarted and mumbling something about Lady Luck standing him up. Kaiba gave a moment to wonder if there was anyway that Joey could possibly sue him and his locker for brain damage. He quickly dismissed this thought, deciding it couldn't possibly be damaged any further.
Rolling his eyes, Kaiba took out the books he needed before giving the blonde's foot a soft kick to bring him back to reality. When Joey made no move to get up, but just moaned pitifully and rolled over, Kaiba chuckled slightly to himself, telling Joey to get to class because he needed all the help he could get.
Then he left.
The bastard left him to die here.
Joey groaned again, vaguely wondering if God was using him as his own private comedy channel. It wouldn't surprise him. He was probably up there laughing at his misfortunes at this very moment. He waved an angry fist at the general direction of the ceiling. Stop it. Stop it right now.
He slowly picked himself back up, watching the brunette's retreating back. Kaiba turned around for a brief moment, raising an expectant eyebrow at the blonde, who was still standing next to Kaiba's locker, looking confused. Why had he just left him there, not even offering a hand up like a gentleman should?
When Joey made no movement to come to class right away, Kaiba seemed to shrug to himself, and continued to walk away.
Joey reasoned that Kaiba probably had never even heard of the word gentleman, let alone know how to act like one. After all, one with as little social skills as Kaiba could not be expected to know the etiquette of helping a damsel in distress up to his feet after he has taken a fall.
The blonde sighed, leaning back to rest his head on a locker behind him. It looked like it was time for him to devise a Plan D, seeing as Plan C: Operation Make Out Session of Kaiba's Life didn't come into play.
But was a Plan D even worth it? Nothing Joey did seem to get Kaiba's attention. The brunette just didn't seem to care. Joey quickly shook his head to get of those unwanted thoughts.
Kaiba was just clueless, right? Anti-social and dense as a rock, right?
He was relatively sure the brunette loved him.