It Could Be... Oh, It Really Could Be...
Yugioh "ICOE" - chp. 15 ("Hearing the Saddest Songs")
Seto/Anzu (small Jounouchi/Mai)
Light shone in through a small, blue-curtained window. Mai blinked open her eyes and smiled. Already, the morning was looking lovely. She yawned and sat up slowly. Jounouchi was still asleep, snoring loudly on the other side of the bed. She snuck out from under the blanket and tip-toed into the kitchen, careful not to wake her "sleeping beauty".
After a few minutes, she was sitting at the small table - a book under the wobbly leg - waiting for the coffee to finish. The air was chilly, almost but not quite biting, bringing up bumps on the smooth expanse of her long legs. She yawned again, mentally warming herself with the thought of a hot, hot mug of Jounouchi’s cheap coffee. Everything seemed so right suddenly, with the sun and the cold and the still-fresh feeling of morning pervading her senses. And she was with the one man she truly wanted to be with, nothing getting in the way, no false excuses cropping up suddenly - and it was wonderful like she had only ever dreamed of.
The coffee was ready, so she got two mugs down - one chipped and one emblazoned with an obscenity - and started to pour.
It surprised her when, a moment later, a shuffling presence came in, bleary-eyed and warm and bubbling over with the remnants of pleasant sleep. Said presence shuffled over and, wrapping its arms around her waist, murmured a gruff "good morning".
And Mai didn’t mind that the presence was shuffly or that its breath was atrocious or that it was sporting boxers with more than two holes - because it was love, love, love, love, love.
And it was wonderful.
(Line)
Again - Seto’s head was pounding, hurting with a mad, blinding pain that kept coherent thought at bay and made his eyeballs feel square in their sockets. But that only frustrated him, and his frustration only fueled his rather monstrously large sense of determination. He would finish his work, even if he had to tear out his eyeballs, stopped breathing, had to chew off his own foot to get his mind off the tedium and pain, experienced actual cranial implosion, or otherwise lost any and/or all vital functions.
He was beginning to believe that perhaps he had become slightly more ill than he had previously hypothesized.
In addition to the stress of work and the nagging voice in the back of his head that kept threatening him with unconsciousness, he had to endure unusually strange behavior from his secretary. Kudo was normally efficient and unintrusive, but she had been coming in more and more often, wearing shorter and shorter skirts, and saying things that even Seto was having trouble passing off as non-flirtatious. Though never one to admit that he had assumed wrongly, he couldn’t help but wonder if maybe Anzu hadn’t had some tiny semblance of a point.
And that day just had to be the one that all his worst fears about her were confirmed.
"Excuse me, sir," Sakura said from her desk in the reception area beyond his door, "but I have that file for you. Would you like me to bring it in?"
"Hell, Kudo, of course I want it brought in. In fact, please bring it in - bring it in now, before I am forced to relieve you of your current position."
"Fair enough, sir," she quipped, suddenly standing in the doorframe. She sauntered over to his desk, hips swaying. There was something about the smirk she wore across her scarlet-red lips that should have set off warning bells. But Seto did not have normal warning bells.
She laid the report on his desk. Then, quite unexpectedly, she sat down next to it.
"Report on desk is fine, Kudo," Seto told her dryly, not looking up from the computer, "your ass, however, is not."
"My apologies," she told him, voice dripping with warmth and syrupy feminine wiles.
An eyebrow raised.
"Really? You don’t sound sorry at all. Get back to work."
‘Damn,’
she thought, ‘he even sounds distracted. Maybe this will be easier than I thought.’
"If you don’t mind my saying so, you look exhausted. You really could use a break, sir."
"Hmph. As it turns out, I very much mind you saying so." He glanced up at her, eyes authoritative and hard. "And I don’t repeat myself."
"Get back to work, yes I know. I’m actually quite eager." She slid of the desk - in a way that would have been so appreciated had it been any other man - and shook her hair loose from the elegant clip she had held it in. "But please... You’re wound so very, very tight. It’s hardly giving off any good vibes. Not at all a pleasant environment to work in. I’d be more than happy to help you relax."
"No."
She walked around the desk slowly, heading behind him. "Please, sir, I only want to help." Without waiting for another dismissal, she put her hands on his shoulders and began gently kneading tired muscles. "You’re so tense - if you feel better, then I assure you more work will get done."
Initially, he wanted to push her off and - in lieu of polite dismissal - scream very nasty things at her. However, after a nanosecond of far-too-wonderful pressure, he was less inclined to give in to that impulse. Oh hell, he realized with some amount of trepidation, he was going to give in - it felt so good when he felt so bad that he wanted to absolutely cry. Except he didn’t, and on the surface of his mind, he wished it was Anzu rubbing his shoulders instead of Sakura.
"There," she said, nearly purring, "doesn’t that feel so much better? You just keep working - I’m only here to help you relax."
He let out a very clipped groan.
"Or," she said, her voice far too warm for a strictly professional conversation, "you could just... take a little break, and let me ease out all that tension."
"No, this is exceedingly inappropriate. If I wasn’t so... so fucking exhausted already, you would no longer have a job."
"That’s right," Sakura cooed, "just enjoy it." Her hands slipped further down, nails raking over his chest. If she could just keep him occupied for a little longer, he’d be receptive to her moving a little further.
"No..." His head felt fuzzy, and though his eyes were closed he could feel his suddenly blurry vision. Why was the room on fire? It was so hot; his skin itched with the heat. "Anzu... You don’t understand, Kudo, I don’t want this." He shrugged absently, but she ignored the hint to stop.
"Yes you do, Seto," she said familiarly - though he didn’t even notice. "You haven’t seen it, but there’s something between us. Oh, there could be so much between us."
"Anzu..." He frowned, coming back to his senses, and shrugged more insistently. "Anzu would not approve of this. I - "
"You’re damn right she wouldn’t!" a shrill voice said suddenly. "In fact, I think she’d more than disapprove!"
Seto’s eyes snapped open and he looked over to see Anzu standing just outside his office, clutching the stem of a flower in one hand and what was obviously a homemade lunch in the other. She dropped both and ran off as fast as she could, obviously headed out of the building as far away from Seto as it was possible to get.
"Shit," he cursed, suddenly gathering all his energy and standing. "Anzu! Anzu, wait!" But she didn’t answer, either too far away to hear or too angry to care. Seto slammed his fist down on his desk. "Damn it, this is the last thing I needed."
He turned to Sakura, his eyes blazing. "Kudo," he barked, "I want you to finish all your work as quickly as is humanly possible. In fact, I want tomorrow’s work done by the end of today as well." He glared, eyes narrowing. "If you accomplish that, you might still have a job."
Without waiting for a response, he hunched over the paperwork on his desk, sorting through it and making piles of what needed to be done immediately and what could wait. Sensing that she wasn’t wanted - in fact, so very unwanted that it couldn’t be more painfully obvious - Sakura retreated back to her desk. Reluctantly, and feeling the distinct bite of failure all the while, she got back to her work.
Close to an hour later, after phone calls and documents and staring at a computer that took away his sanity as surely as it impaired his vision, Seto was rushing out of the office, giving Sakura a brief verbal message that he had his cell phone to pass along to any potential callers.
(Line)
Anzu sniffled, curled up on her couch, unable to stem the heavy flow of tears.
"How... How could he!" she seethed. "After he promised me nothing was going on!" She let out a half-hearted shriek and, burying her face in her arms, began crying harder.
She had wandered around in shock for about fifteen minutes, before finally deciding to head back to her apartment. What she needed most, she realized, was a good cry.
And suddenly, a knock on the door interrupted that.
"Anzu!" a stern voice called. "I know you’re in there! Let me in. Damn it, I need to talk to you."
"Seto!" she hissed, ire rising. "I don’t want to talk to you - there’s nothing to say. Go the hell away!"
"Anzu, if you don’t let me in, then I’m going to unlock this door myself." She knew he would do it, too - he did, after all, have a spare key. "Obviously I have some explaining to do, and I am going to clear this whole misunderstanding up. Now let me in, or I assure you I will continue to yell at you, everything I need to say, where your neighbors will have no trouble hearing me!"
He waited for a moment, ear near the door, and sure enough he could make out footsteps coming towards him. He stepped back as he heard her undo the lock. The door was flung open, and an irate Anzu stood before him. She glared, her eyes puffy and red. Then she slapped him. And promptly slammed the door.
"Fuck," he whispered, leaning a hot, heavy forehead against the door. The situation was just getting uglier. "Anzu," he yelled, his voice nearly hoarse, "you are going to have to talk to me eventually; it’s ridiculous to think that you can stay in there forever. It... I know you don’t want to hear this, but it wasn’t what it looked like!" He could hardly stand up - his whole body was screaming at him to go lay down and rest. "I’m going to go and give you time to calm down; but you can’t just ignore me, Anzu. We are going to talk about this eventually."
Huddled back on her couch, Anzu angrily wiped her eyes. "Oh, we’ll talk about it. I’ll remind you of what a back-stabbing, low-life, two-timing asshole you are." She threw a pillow across the room, feeling no satisfaction as it hit the wall with a dull thud. "Damn it!" she screamed. "Why? Why! I love you, Seto," she sobbed, falling onto her back. "I love you; how could you let that scheming secretary even touch you?" She let out a choked, bubble sort of sob - it exploded in the air with a full, wet "pop".
She could hardly remember ever feeling worse. She was hurt - and though a part of her heart demanded that she allow him a chance to explain what she had seen, her mind was raging and furious and it wanted nothing more than to never, ever, ever have to see that cheating bastard again.
***
There is, at this point, a huge possibility that the chapter will end there. I actually have a little more in the outline: Anzu wanting to call Yugi for comfort, a small Yugi and Rebecca scene, even a little longer confrontation scene between Anzu and Seto, but... well, that's just what came out. I don't know. I'm still debating over whether to add anything or just keep it the same. Heh. I'm REALLY unsure about the confrontation scene, actually. I think that it's fine, but at the same time I think it needs a little more. Like maybe them actually having a conversation - words exchanged and all that. And I might make Seto even sicker. Heh. Yes, that's a poorly added plot device designed to aid in their later reconciliation. I am not ashamed of the things I do to make things easier on myself. Heh. He doesn't have anything really specific - just maybe a cold-ish something or other and working himself past the point of exhaustion. Well! More or not, we'll just have to see.
-ILB
***
Seto/Anzu (small Jounouchi/Mai)
Light shone in through a small, blue-curtained window. Mai blinked open her eyes and smiled. Already, the morning was looking lovely. She yawned and sat up slowly. Jounouchi was still asleep, snoring loudly on the other side of the bed. She snuck out from under the blanket and tip-toed into the kitchen, careful not to wake her "sleeping beauty".
After a few minutes, she was sitting at the small table - a book under the wobbly leg - waiting for the coffee to finish. The air was chilly, almost but not quite biting, bringing up bumps on the smooth expanse of her long legs. She yawned again, mentally warming herself with the thought of a hot, hot mug of Jounouchi’s cheap coffee. Everything seemed so right suddenly, with the sun and the cold and the still-fresh feeling of morning pervading her senses. And she was with the one man she truly wanted to be with, nothing getting in the way, no false excuses cropping up suddenly - and it was wonderful like she had only ever dreamed of.
The coffee was ready, so she got two mugs down - one chipped and one emblazoned with an obscenity - and started to pour.
It surprised her when, a moment later, a shuffling presence came in, bleary-eyed and warm and bubbling over with the remnants of pleasant sleep. Said presence shuffled over and, wrapping its arms around her waist, murmured a gruff "good morning".
And Mai didn’t mind that the presence was shuffly or that its breath was atrocious or that it was sporting boxers with more than two holes - because it was love, love, love, love, love.
And it was wonderful.
(Line)
Again - Seto’s head was pounding, hurting with a mad, blinding pain that kept coherent thought at bay and made his eyeballs feel square in their sockets. But that only frustrated him, and his frustration only fueled his rather monstrously large sense of determination. He would finish his work, even if he had to tear out his eyeballs, stopped breathing, had to chew off his own foot to get his mind off the tedium and pain, experienced actual cranial implosion, or otherwise lost any and/or all vital functions.
He was beginning to believe that perhaps he had become slightly more ill than he had previously hypothesized.
In addition to the stress of work and the nagging voice in the back of his head that kept threatening him with unconsciousness, he had to endure unusually strange behavior from his secretary. Kudo was normally efficient and unintrusive, but she had been coming in more and more often, wearing shorter and shorter skirts, and saying things that even Seto was having trouble passing off as non-flirtatious. Though never one to admit that he had assumed wrongly, he couldn’t help but wonder if maybe Anzu hadn’t had some tiny semblance of a point.
And that day just had to be the one that all his worst fears about her were confirmed.
"Excuse me, sir," Sakura said from her desk in the reception area beyond his door, "but I have that file for you. Would you like me to bring it in?"
"Hell, Kudo, of course I want it brought in. In fact, please bring it in - bring it in now, before I am forced to relieve you of your current position."
"Fair enough, sir," she quipped, suddenly standing in the doorframe. She sauntered over to his desk, hips swaying. There was something about the smirk she wore across her scarlet-red lips that should have set off warning bells. But Seto did not have normal warning bells.
She laid the report on his desk. Then, quite unexpectedly, she sat down next to it.
"Report on desk is fine, Kudo," Seto told her dryly, not looking up from the computer, "your ass, however, is not."
"My apologies," she told him, voice dripping with warmth and syrupy feminine wiles.
An eyebrow raised.
"Really? You don’t sound sorry at all. Get back to work."
‘Damn,’
she thought, ‘he even sounds distracted. Maybe this will be easier than I thought.’
"If you don’t mind my saying so, you look exhausted. You really could use a break, sir."
"Hmph. As it turns out, I very much mind you saying so." He glanced up at her, eyes authoritative and hard. "And I don’t repeat myself."
"Get back to work, yes I know. I’m actually quite eager." She slid of the desk - in a way that would have been so appreciated had it been any other man - and shook her hair loose from the elegant clip she had held it in. "But please... You’re wound so very, very tight. It’s hardly giving off any good vibes. Not at all a pleasant environment to work in. I’d be more than happy to help you relax."
"No."
She walked around the desk slowly, heading behind him. "Please, sir, I only want to help." Without waiting for another dismissal, she put her hands on his shoulders and began gently kneading tired muscles. "You’re so tense - if you feel better, then I assure you more work will get done."
Initially, he wanted to push her off and - in lieu of polite dismissal - scream very nasty things at her. However, after a nanosecond of far-too-wonderful pressure, he was less inclined to give in to that impulse. Oh hell, he realized with some amount of trepidation, he was going to give in - it felt so good when he felt so bad that he wanted to absolutely cry. Except he didn’t, and on the surface of his mind, he wished it was Anzu rubbing his shoulders instead of Sakura.
"There," she said, nearly purring, "doesn’t that feel so much better? You just keep working - I’m only here to help you relax."
He let out a very clipped groan.
"Or," she said, her voice far too warm for a strictly professional conversation, "you could just... take a little break, and let me ease out all that tension."
"No, this is exceedingly inappropriate. If I wasn’t so... so fucking exhausted already, you would no longer have a job."
"That’s right," Sakura cooed, "just enjoy it." Her hands slipped further down, nails raking over his chest. If she could just keep him occupied for a little longer, he’d be receptive to her moving a little further.
"No..." His head felt fuzzy, and though his eyes were closed he could feel his suddenly blurry vision. Why was the room on fire? It was so hot; his skin itched with the heat. "Anzu... You don’t understand, Kudo, I don’t want this." He shrugged absently, but she ignored the hint to stop.
"Yes you do, Seto," she said familiarly - though he didn’t even notice. "You haven’t seen it, but there’s something between us. Oh, there could be so much between us."
"Anzu..." He frowned, coming back to his senses, and shrugged more insistently. "Anzu would not approve of this. I - "
"You’re damn right she wouldn’t!" a shrill voice said suddenly. "In fact, I think she’d more than disapprove!"
Seto’s eyes snapped open and he looked over to see Anzu standing just outside his office, clutching the stem of a flower in one hand and what was obviously a homemade lunch in the other. She dropped both and ran off as fast as she could, obviously headed out of the building as far away from Seto as it was possible to get.
"Shit," he cursed, suddenly gathering all his energy and standing. "Anzu! Anzu, wait!" But she didn’t answer, either too far away to hear or too angry to care. Seto slammed his fist down on his desk. "Damn it, this is the last thing I needed."
He turned to Sakura, his eyes blazing. "Kudo," he barked, "I want you to finish all your work as quickly as is humanly possible. In fact, I want tomorrow’s work done by the end of today as well." He glared, eyes narrowing. "If you accomplish that, you might still have a job."
Without waiting for a response, he hunched over the paperwork on his desk, sorting through it and making piles of what needed to be done immediately and what could wait. Sensing that she wasn’t wanted - in fact, so very unwanted that it couldn’t be more painfully obvious - Sakura retreated back to her desk. Reluctantly, and feeling the distinct bite of failure all the while, she got back to her work.
Close to an hour later, after phone calls and documents and staring at a computer that took away his sanity as surely as it impaired his vision, Seto was rushing out of the office, giving Sakura a brief verbal message that he had his cell phone to pass along to any potential callers.
(Line)
Anzu sniffled, curled up on her couch, unable to stem the heavy flow of tears.
"How... How could he!" she seethed. "After he promised me nothing was going on!" She let out a half-hearted shriek and, burying her face in her arms, began crying harder.
She had wandered around in shock for about fifteen minutes, before finally deciding to head back to her apartment. What she needed most, she realized, was a good cry.
And suddenly, a knock on the door interrupted that.
"Anzu!" a stern voice called. "I know you’re in there! Let me in. Damn it, I need to talk to you."
"Seto!" she hissed, ire rising. "I don’t want to talk to you - there’s nothing to say. Go the hell away!"
"Anzu, if you don’t let me in, then I’m going to unlock this door myself." She knew he would do it, too - he did, after all, have a spare key. "Obviously I have some explaining to do, and I am going to clear this whole misunderstanding up. Now let me in, or I assure you I will continue to yell at you, everything I need to say, where your neighbors will have no trouble hearing me!"
He waited for a moment, ear near the door, and sure enough he could make out footsteps coming towards him. He stepped back as he heard her undo the lock. The door was flung open, and an irate Anzu stood before him. She glared, her eyes puffy and red. Then she slapped him. And promptly slammed the door.
"Fuck," he whispered, leaning a hot, heavy forehead against the door. The situation was just getting uglier. "Anzu," he yelled, his voice nearly hoarse, "you are going to have to talk to me eventually; it’s ridiculous to think that you can stay in there forever. It... I know you don’t want to hear this, but it wasn’t what it looked like!" He could hardly stand up - his whole body was screaming at him to go lay down and rest. "I’m going to go and give you time to calm down; but you can’t just ignore me, Anzu. We are going to talk about this eventually."
Huddled back on her couch, Anzu angrily wiped her eyes. "Oh, we’ll talk about it. I’ll remind you of what a back-stabbing, low-life, two-timing asshole you are." She threw a pillow across the room, feeling no satisfaction as it hit the wall with a dull thud. "Damn it!" she screamed. "Why? Why! I love you, Seto," she sobbed, falling onto her back. "I love you; how could you let that scheming secretary even touch you?" She let out a choked, bubble sort of sob - it exploded in the air with a full, wet "pop".
She could hardly remember ever feeling worse. She was hurt - and though a part of her heart demanded that she allow him a chance to explain what she had seen, her mind was raging and furious and it wanted nothing more than to never, ever, ever have to see that cheating bastard again.
***
There is, at this point, a huge possibility that the chapter will end there. I actually have a little more in the outline: Anzu wanting to call Yugi for comfort, a small Yugi and Rebecca scene, even a little longer confrontation scene between Anzu and Seto, but... well, that's just what came out. I don't know. I'm still debating over whether to add anything or just keep it the same. Heh. I'm REALLY unsure about the confrontation scene, actually. I think that it's fine, but at the same time I think it needs a little more. Like maybe them actually having a conversation - words exchanged and all that. And I might make Seto even sicker. Heh. Yes, that's a poorly added plot device designed to aid in their later reconciliation. I am not ashamed of the things I do to make things easier on myself. Heh. He doesn't have anything really specific - just maybe a cold-ish something or other and working himself past the point of exhaustion. Well! More or not, we'll just have to see.
-ILB
***