Prodigyshipping (Seto x Rebecca)


He really shouldn't have noticed her at all. What he should have been doing was headed to a business meeting, which, instead of taking place in a company conference room like it should, was being held in a small teacher's lounge in an American middle school. Seto growled under his breath and decided to make this deal as difficult as possible for his prospective partner. The man was a paranoid maniac, convinced his ideas were amazing (which, some of them were, admittedly) and that people would try to steal them. He refused to do business in a company, claiming his intellectual property would be stolen.

So Seto Kaiba was stalking down an empty middle school hallway, annoyingly lost and about to be late for the meeting. Well. Maybe that would serve the lunatic right.

His eyes flicked into each room, looking for the right number or some sign that he was in the right hallway. But every classroom looked the same, and it was starting to get on Seto's nerves. So when he saw someone sitting in one of the rooms, it made him do a double-take to make sure he had actually seen someone.

The blonde girl sat at a desk, her face leaned against her hand. She looked bored out of her skull. Her glasses were slipping down her nose, but she didn't move to fix them. In front of her was a piece of paper. From here, he couldn't really see what it was, but it appeared to be half covered in writing and half covered in numbers. Her pencil sat on the floor, forgotten beside her.

He glanced at the door plate. Under the room number, the words "Detention Center" were written. Looking at the girl, he couldn't see what she had done that merited detention, but sometimes, you could never tell by looking. For a moment, he considered asking her where the teacher's lounge was. Or, better idea, there had to be a teacher supervising her in there that he could ask. He hated to ask for help, but if he wanted to get there, it seemed he didn't have a choice. Damn American schools, with their different set ups and confusing, sprawling hallways.

He pushed through the door with a snap. The girl looked up, startled. And then, Seto suddenly recognized her. It was Rebecca Hopkins, one of the competitors in his KC Grand Prix, one of Yugi's friends. He groaned mentally: couldn't he go anywhere without running into someone connected to Yugi?

He gave the room a cursory glance and was surprised to find that there wasn't a teacher in sight. So he turned his eyes to Rebecca, wondering if she recognized him. It was a stupid thought – of course she recognized him.

"What are you doing here?" Rebecca demanded.

"That's not really your business, is it?"

"Is it Mr. Faust and his pitch?"

It took Seto half a second to process what she had said. It took another half a second for him to regain his composure – how had she known that? He didn't get a chance to ask her.

"He thinks he's safer in a school than in a company," Rebecca said, sounding almost bored. "He doesn't realize that American schools have security systems. And those are really easy to hack compared to the other stuff I've gotten into."

"Oh, really?" Seto said, annoyed now. "And I suppose you think you're some kind of genius?"

"Pretty much," Rebecca said, shrugging. "I heard you were quite the child prodigy yourself. It shouldn't be so surprising."

Seto glared at her for a minute. But she was right, he had been labeled a prodigy as a child. He had hated it, too – everyone always simultaneously praising him to his face and being worried about him behind his back. The teachers had never gotten it. And Gozaburo had exploited it.

He shook his head.

"So you hacked the school security system. Why?"

"I saw Mr. Faust outside a couple days ago. I knew who he was, wondered why he was here, wanted to find out," she said. "And I did."

Seto's lips twitched slightly.

"Curious, aren't you?"

"Aren't you?" Rebecca shot back. "You'd have done the same, I expect."

Seto shrugged. But, he realized, she was right. He remembered when he was ten, just after Gozaburo had adopted him and Mokuba, he had hacked into the mansion's security system and reprogrammed it to make duck noises when the fire alarm was pulled. Mokuba had thought it was hilarious. But he had just been trying to distract Gozaburo from the fact that he had really synched his personal computer to the security cameras, so he could watch Gozaburo's secret meetings.

Seto studied Rebecca for a minute. What was she doing here, anyway? A smart girl like her shouldn't be in middle school anymore. America was a lot more flexible when it came to moving up grades, more than Japan, anyway.

"Why are you in detention?" Seto asked.

"That's none of your business," Rebecca said petulantly.

Seto half smirked, and yanked the piece of paper out from under Rebecca's hand.

"Hey!"

Rebecca tried to snatch it back, but Seto was much taller than her, and it was child's play to keep it out of her reach.

"'I will not correct my teacher,'" he read out loud. "Repeated several times, and then replaced with a page and a half of calculus."

Rebecca's cheeks burned.

"He...he was teaching the Pythagorean Theorem wrong," she said. "And I got bored of repeating the sentence, okay?"

She managed to take her paper back from him. Angrily, she crumpled it into a ball and threw it across the room.

"Your teacher's not going to like that," Seto said dryly.

"I don't care. He's a jerk," Rebecca said. There was heat in her words, and Seto was almost surprised that she didn't set the desks on fire with her breath.

Seto looked down at the girl for a long moment. Her arms folded, her face red with anger, the paper crumpled on the other side of the room...the calculus and complex theories chasing themselves around in her head, unable to be unleashed because something was holding her back.

Seto's lip curled. For some reason, this was making him a lot more irritated than he had been before. He glanced back into the hallway.

"Where's your supervisor?" he asked.

Rebecca shrugged.

"Who knows? He never sticks around."

"So why haven't you left yet?"

Rebecca stared at him.

"But...then I'd get in more trouble," she said slowly.

"Who's here to tell them that you weren't?" Seto said, raising an eyebrow. "You know, Hopkins, the first thing about changing the things you hate about life is to start breaking a few rules."

"I don't think that's what they want to teach us here."

"Well, maybe they phrase it as 'taking advantage of the situation,' or 'making the most out of what you have,' but it all means the same thing. You should know that. You're a genius, apparently."

Rebecca looked up at him for a long, long moment. Then a smile crossed her face.

"You know," she said. "You're not as big of a jerk face as I thought you were."

Seto's eyes narrowed in annoyance, but Rebecca was already darting towards the door. She hesitated for a brief moment in the threshold.

"Oh, and Mr. Faust is in the teacher's lounge, down the hallway, to the left, second door on the right," she said.

And then she was gone. Seto stared after her for a moment. How had she known he was lost?

Then he shook his head.

"Child geniuses," he muttered.

And he stalked out of the room.


A/N: If not for the age difference, I would support this pairing. Next is Prizeshipping (Seto x Mokuba x Yami no Yugi).