thank you to evee90 and icraft for your support and reviews. super appreciate it! i own nothing but the plot. ~raz0rs
Chapter six: Unwarranted Alliances.
Dawn came quickly, the subway quicker, and soon she was walking into homeroom, bag slung over shoulder, headphones still pumping through her playlists and blocking out the sounds of the morning commotion. She had made sure to get there early, and reclaimed her battle station in the back right corner of the room. No one was there yet, it was a good 20 minutes until people would start showing up, and for her this was advantageous. She could set herself up for the day, ready her arsenal of notebooks and get some inventory of sketches drafted. The sketches would serve as models she wanted to make before her interview on Saturday.
The blue eyes she had sculpted yesterday in her independent art study had gone well, so maybe she should model some more dragons like red eyes. Or perhaps, even, her favorite card, Zoa; a fiendish creature she had always had an attraction to.
Duel monsters to her was like magic the gathering, or Pokémon, she always used whatever monsters she thought were coolest. What was the appeal if she couldn't use awesome creatures to crush her opponents? But she had never been skilled at any card game, including poker, and her mother didn't have time to play with her. So she had collected the cards simply because she liked the artwork, and it gave her ideas for modeling and making her fantasy worlds.
She doodled a humanoid Kaiser seahorse in her notebook, figuring she needed to model some humanoid cards as well to diversify her portfolio. A flash of movement caught her eye and she glanced up to see the punk-hair kid and his trio of faithful friends following him into the room. Clicking her music on her phone down she quickly resumed her doodling and rested her head back on her hand, letting her hair cascade down over her notebook to cover it from prying eyes. A habit she had had since her elementary school years that protected her from onlookers.
It wasn't until she felt a tap on the shoulder that she realized they had been trying to get her attention. Somehow they migrated over to her desk, she hissed a small "tch" trying to control her irritation. She had turned her music down to be polite, but her headphones were clearly visible. Wasn't that enough of a social queue to indicate the desire for space? Clearly not to these four fools. She slowly lifted her head to see the short punk, with the crazy yellow bangs and pink tipped black hair. He sat at the desk in front of her, smile plastered on his face, big hopeful purple eyes radiating cheerfulness.
She hated him nearly instantly; it was something about his smile. The girl stood next to him, amplifying his obvious lack of height. The blonde sat across from her and the brunette in front of him, the other three smiling as well. Who could possibly be this cheery this early? Pulling the headphones down, she addressed him with the most polite "Yes?" she could muster. She had skipped the coffee this morning; it never mixed well with her stomach when anxiety was gnawing at her.
"Hello Kisara! I'm Yugi, this is Tea, Tristan and Joey!" He named them in order pointing at each person who smiled in turn. "Welcome to Domino High!" He all but beamed. She had an urge to bite him, just to crack that perky little smile of his. She kept her face in check and forced a smile, nodding politely and glancing back down at her notebook. Perhaps they'd get the hint.
"Nice to meet you!" Tea, the brunette with a voice like pink bubblegum popping added. The other two nodded their agreement, smiling ear to ear.
"Thank you." Kisara croaked out, slowly becoming aware more students were filtering into the room.
"We just wanted to say hello and invite you to hang out with us at my grandpa's game shop! We have practice duels all the time if you like duel monsters, and all sorts of other games." His genuine assertiveness made her suspicious, and her past experiences with making friends always ended poorly. Either she was some sort of trophy to show off, some pun of some prank, or just a token team member to a club she didn't know she joined. There was safety for Kisara in avoiding all of those circumstances.
"Yeah! Yugi's the boni-fied champion of duel monsters, aren't you Yug?" The blonde laughed, a thick American accent obvious in his speech. The way he grinned and looked to the others for support reminded her of a Labrador looking for a treat after performing a trick. A smile pinched the corner of her mouth as she watched Yugi blush. "What yug? Gotta be proud of yourself sometimes! Plus you said—"
"Yeah, yeah ok Joey!" The brunette cut off the blonde with a sharp smile and he all but curled his tail between his legs. Golden retriever perhaps, or some sort of mix. Part of her wanted to know what he was going to say, but the logical half of her brain didn't care.
"Do you like duel monsters Kisara?" Tea asked genuinely and Kisara was almost positive she could smell the artificial pink dye in her overly genuinely friendly smile.
"Uh, kind of I guess." She stated flatly, once more eyeing her notepad, her crossed legs beginning to kick in an anxious manner. It was beginning to feel like she was a cornered wounded creature. What did these kids want from her, anyway?
"You should come by the shop then!" Yugi beamed at her again and she clenched her fist in her lap, wringing the hem of her skirt and trying to smile. "We'd love to have you over, in fact we could all teach you how to play."
"That's right, even this bozo here placed fourth in the battle city tournament!" The one called Tristan laughed, punching joey in the shoulder, he scowled in response.
"Well maybe… I have a lot of work to do before the weekend…" She trailed off, looking over at the wall, every ounce of her trying to control her urge to go off on them and scare them away for good. They were just trying to be friendly, so she should be civil, but she had already decided not to play the usual reindeer games of friendship here. School, work and home. She'd get a cat if she wanted companionship.
"Sure, well maybe we could eat with you at lunch? You're second block right? We could even teach you the history of the game." Tea spoke again and Yugi nodded enthusiastically.
"Well, maybe, and like I said I have work to do…" She trailed off again, trying to think of a courteous way to end the conversation and get them away from her. The classroom was filling up quickly and her time to plan her day was being taken away by the friendship brigade.
"You should come to the museum with us tonight! They have this amazing tablet, one of the things that inspired the game, even—" Joey started and was quickly interrupted by a sharp voice that cut through the conversation like steel.
"Babbling again about your fantasies wheeler?" Seto Kaiba attacked, not evening sparing the group a sideways glance as he turned the page of a small black book. Kisara's stomach dropped out as she realized he had snuck in without her noticing. Damn, she had lost her sense of control by letting these loosers distract her with their incessant bickering. It would have been advantageous to have the high field in her mental battle against on the CEO, so that he couldn't and wouldn't sneak up on her again.
"They ain't fantasies moneybags!" The blonde barked back turning halfway in the desk and nearly knocking it over, like a mutt defending scraps.
"Oh, excuse me, I meant delusions. Like your delusion that you belonged in my tournament." Kaiba shot back without moving. It reminded Kisara of a spelling bee judge dictating the usage of a word in a sentence. She couldn't hide her small smirk.
"Well explain how he placed fourth then Kaiba, and you third." Yugi shouted, his eyebrows drawn down in anger. Kisara blinked over Kaiba, from everything she had read he was all but unstoppable in his card-game empire, a master of everything he took on. And these bozos had beat him? There had to be some kind of story behind that.
"Luck of course. And I guess every dog has his day ..." He chuckled lightly, eyes never leaving the page. Kisara's smirk grew slightly larger, and she looked down quickly to hide it, her cheeks burned red under her thin skin. It seemed they shared a viewpoint on this group of geeks.
"Asshole!" Joey shot up out of his desk but Tristan quickly grabbed him and a loud— "You guys!" from Tea stopped all the movement. "That's not what we are trying to discuss here" She hissed the second part through clenched teeth. Joey rubbed his nose with the back of his hand and turned back around dolefully. All their attention seemed to zoom back in on Kisara. She was hoping they'd forgotten her in their little made-for-tv-drama. It appeared she was not so lucky, she realized and the smirk slid sideways off her face.
"So, anyway, what do you say Kisara? Would you like to see the museum with us tonight?" Yugi's questioned hopefully, followed by cheery eyes as all four of them focused on her with laser like attention.
Uneasily she cleared her throat and paused before speaking, attempting to feign courtesy. "Like I mentioned, I am really busy. Possibly another time, if I have it. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to …work." And with that, she pulled her headphones back over her ears and looked back down, hunching over her notebook and flipping the page.
She began to doodle again, not drawing anything-specific, just waiting for them to clear out, leaving her volume off to gauge their reactions.
"Good job joey." Tristan hissed as he rose to his feet.
"What? I was just trying to help." The blonde bantered back in his snarky accent, his shoes making a loud squeak as he jumped out of his desk in a overly dramatic gymnastic manner. Kisara rolled her eyes, this was insane: stupidly typically annoying insane.
"Well getting Kaiba involved certainly isn't going to help anything." Tea muttered under her breath. With a quick glance up Kisara noticed the girl's obvious disapproval written all over her face, as clear as her melodic voice.
"Either way eventually if we give her some time maybe we can convince her." Yugi whispered back to Tea, who smiled as they made their way back to the desk at the front. When she couldn't hear them anymore she changed reconnaissance tactics and studied each of them.
If she had learned one thing in her life it was that social interaction especially school was like war. In order to survive she needed preparation, tactics and advantage. Naturally, she was an ill-suited player, not physically strong she made up her lack of physique with over-compensating her intellect. Yet, that didn't end well for most protagonists, so instead of an armor of friendship and love she built her walls of stone and isolated herself. If you made no allies, no one could betray you, and if you lost all alone at least you have no one to blame but yourself; cutthroat and cold, calculating as hell but effective nevertheless, this stratagem had proven successful.
Feigning false attentiveness to her notebook, silently she collected intel. Love interest for punk kid was Tea, and comic relief had to be the blonde. And so that made the brunette man a simple side character or plot device? It was all to easy, all to analogous to her books and stories.
Leering, she brushed her hair out of her eyes, unintentionally glancing over at Kaiba, who had one way or another helped her out of this persistently annoying situation. He was rotating his trademark time-stopping stares between his book and the goon squad every couple seconds. Legendary scowl glued on his face his eyes burned like a pilot light, easily ready to click into gear and burn into them if they dared turn back his way. There was no way, in her mind at least, in fairness and reality those four had beaten Kaiba in his own tournament.
She scrawled "battle city" in the corner of her notebook, reminding herself to research it later and figure out just how they had managed it.
After a while of side eyeing him she noticed he hand gone back to truly reading, and believed it was the giggling girls that had flooded back into the front of his row of desks that had driven the diversion of his attention. Fangirls, it struck her as she recalled her reading from the night before. It seemed obvious to her now as she watched them throw glances back over their shoulders, reddening from their chins to shins every time they did. She had felt some sort of pity for him when she had read about all the times girls threw themselves into his life. One girl had even attempted to break into his home. The sympathy would have been more genuine if he hadn't been so unbelievably indestructible and otherworldly. As if he had no weakness, a god walking among mere mortals. She scoffed slightly at herself, imagining him in a toga without desiring it. (At least, deliberately.)
But whatever his social life was, greek or no, it was a secret to the media and all of her research. If he had a lady in his life, he kept her as safe as he did his little brother, and out of the terrifyingly all-seeing eye of the paparazzi. The girls started shooting daggers at her when they caught her staring at them, so she passive-aggressively put her head back down and growled low in her throat, suddenly feeling an odd sense of alignment to the CEO. She broke then lead in her pencil as she scrawled armour onto the seahorse-knight, anger flooding her quickly to replace the likeness she had started seeing between her and Kaiba. She wasn't on his level, and knew she never could be, but as someone who did deal with constantly frustrating attention she could see how he felt. It was so unfair to him really, to have his whole life out on display, no privacy what so ever; people digging for information on him, and hounding him even at school. Which of course she was guilty of both, she noted with a hiss.
Embarrassment flooded her and guilt followed, she was no better than the giggle-girls. Here she was making allusions at alliances without even knowing the first thing about him she didn't gather from being an outsider peering into his life. Maybe she should apologize to him, or thank him, or something. But wouldn't that make her look even crazier than her behavior before? Or did she owe it to him for getting the friendship fools away from her? What a stupid conundrum. Her fingers flipped her page crossly, and she began a new doodle, half paying attention to what she was doing physically, lost in her own mental correspondence.
The professor walked in, greeting his students and taking attendance. She nodded when it was appropriate without paying much attention and then started making lists, trying to take her mind off the present and place it into the future, her future. So that she could eventually not have to deal with annoying problems like the feelings twisting in her gut, threatening like a tornado warning to flatten everything she had rebuilt in her life. He sat seven seats away, laptop once again in place and those long elegant fingers working the keys without any real effort. It took everything within her not to look over, to keep her head down and her focus on her work. Why did she find him so stupidly mesmerizing? He was the twister, the hurricane threatening to wipe out her foundation. He was nothing but pain to her, one way or another. It wans an eventuality, and just a matter of when. She needed to eliminate the thought, the idea, the focus. Her eyes flicked over and immediately she kicked herself for watching his hands move. What a stupid thing to be attracted to; hands.
What a stupid thought to think. Never would she ever be attractive to him, and if in some alternate universe he decided to pay her heed, he would eventually betray her like all the others. Eventually she'd find out she was just some kind of butt of some joke, or some stupid fling. The idea disgusted her and pulled the knots in her guts tighter, and brought memories of her one "ex-boyfriend" to the surface of her torrid brain. Three months of some sort of what she thought was happiness, followed quickly by seven of humility and awakening, harsh realization of her situation and social standings. If, and that was a large, IF, someone could get over her odd appearance, she was too thin, too tall and her boobs were too small. She had suggestions of curves but would never fill out a dress, and her demeanor? She laughed out loud despite herself; she was a self-loathing wreck of a woman no therapist could fix.
And that was how she had kept herself afloat, and with mom gone, she doubted anyone would see anything other than her harsh exterior, as cold as the ice her complexion reminisced.
Second part to this is in editing, this just seemed like a natural break. I bet you guys can see what's coming. heh, thanks for the r&r and bearing with the overburdening character development! please let me know if any of this seems verbose or boring, i got a little wordy on this chapter. ~raz0rs