Signs of Flirting
Teddy.syn
Chapter 1: He stares at you—a lot.
The day was warm, the air was clean, the sky was a deep, clear blue. The collective desire of the students to be outside, enjoying life, free, was so strong it was almost a palpable feeling, weighting the atmosphere in the classroom. The weight wasn't heavy, but rather electric: every person in the room could feel the tension—whether they wanted to or not.
Jounouchi Katsuya sighed, his eyes looking longingly in the general direction of the window. Seated in the far back of the classroom, on the side closest to the door, he was as far from the windows as he could possibly be—and as far from his friends, also. Yugi sat in the very front row, one seat over from the windows: he had to look past Anzu to see out. Her eyes were on the board at the front of the class, but it was clear that there would be no new material today. The teacher was every bit as enamored with the beauty of the sky as the students—as the clock ticked the seconds, the tension mounted.
Otogi sat next to Yugi, a fact he wasn't particularly pleased about, while Honda sat behind Anzu. Ryou was two seats behind Otogi. But Jounouchi's gaze wasn't fixed far enough forward for him to be interested in what his friends were up to: he stared directly to his side, casting his view past the boy who sat in the far back corner of the class, at the end of the column Anzu headed. Unlike the rest of the class, this boy was clearly not interested in the weather: his focus lay on the laptop computer on his desk, taken out when it was clear that there would be no new learning material.
Kaiba and Jounouchi had somehow managed to end up in the same class again, and in an attempt to keep them from destroying the school, they had been made to sit far out of punching range. Their ratio of fights to days had lessoned dramatically with the new system, as had the number of trips to the nurse's office. Yet nothing but nothing could keep Jounouchi's attention off of the elder Kaiba brother: he was lucky they were in the same class so that he could listen to the teacher while he stared. There was not a day when the brunette did not catch the blonde's attention.
- -
Kaiba Seto shifted uncomfortably. He could feel the tension in the air and knew that his classmates—the principal liked to call them his peers, though Kaiba disagreed wholeheartedly—were excited for the end of the school day. The general hype was practically visceral, but it was not the cause of the knots in Kaiba's shoulders, nor the tension headache that threatened of an oncoming migraine; no, Kaiba's tension was a direct result of the eyes he could feel boring into the side of his skull. The mutt was staring at him again.
When he had returned to school to find that he had been placed in the same class as Jounouchi for he wasn't even counting anymore how many years in a row, he hadn't really been surprised. While the mutt did his best to blend in on the streets, he was clearly smart enough to be in the same class as Seto himself—the only thing holding the mongrel back was his tendency to belittle himself to the point of uselessness. Seto's cruel comments endured during the early years of their relationship certainly hadn't helped. But their proportion of days sent to the office for fighting with each other to days spent in class at all had improved dramatically—almost to the point of being respectable—since Kaiba had made the compromise with Yugi. The deal was that Seto would refrain from all comments in any way canine in nature towards Jounouchi, in return for some peace: Yugi's end of the bargain was a requirement to drop the 'friends' idea, and to stop pestering him about work so much. The first part of the deal hardly mattered anymore, though: the older Kaiba had begun to eat lunch with 'the gang' whenever he didn't have too much work to do. Some compromise, when Kaiba basically got nothing and still had to put up with the mangy filth's staring every day!
Seto had decided weeks ago that Jounouchi's new purpose in life was to drive the elder Kaiba brother insane. It was the only possible explanation for the ridiculous behavior: what else could the fur ball be attempting, so late in their high school career? Staring at him every day, nonstop, like he was trying to give the boy a complex. Was this his passive-aggressive method of letting the brunette know he worked too much? If it was, it was working. The computer screen didn't help the headache that inevitably came with the staring, and time spent not working in school was setting Kaiba further and further behind at work.
It hadn't begun the first day of school—the staring, that was—Kaiba was sure of that. It seemed to him it had occurred around the time of the first change in seating, when the mutt had realized they were purposefully being kept separate—likely a ploy by the administration to keep them from fighting, lacking knowledge of the truce between the two best duelists in the school. Clearly Jounouchi's actions weren't an attack that had been meditated over the summer and put into effect with such determination as soon as possible—no, it was a reaction to the loss of their fighting. Kaiba was sure. Apparently, Jounouchi wasn't in on the bargain.
What bothered Seto the most, though, wasn't the fact of the staring at all. In truth, it was the method that was getting to the brunette. The look on the blonde's face wasn't one of loathing, of hate or one of the numerous expressions of the varying degrees of upset. He wasn't looking at Kaiba as though the boy had grown a second head, or bat ears, or some other decidedly inhuman body part or irregularity. He was staring as though… as though… Kaiba didn't know. He could tell it wasn't a look of disgust, of hatred—but he couldn't tell what, exactly, it was. Above all else, it was the knowledge that he didn't know what was going on in the blonde's mind that made him so tense.
He could practically see the scowl on his masseuse's face when she went to work on his back, and he smirked. Then he scowled, himself, and turned to glare at the clock, willing the seconds to pass faster so he could leave and take a pain killer. The facial expressions were definitely not helping his Jounouchi-induced headache—though the computer screen, and the programming problem he had been working on, certainly couldn't be counted off of the list of contributors to the pain either. He decided to ignore the programming issue for the moment and closed the laptop, forcing it to sleep and save battery. He would deal with it when the school day ended and he could get away from the mutt and his rude behavior.
As he finished gathering his school supplies in an effort to be ready to bolt at the sound of the final bell, Seto glanced across the room, catching the blonde mutt's gaze and attempting to hold it, to challenge. It didn't work. The instant their eyes met, Jounouchi's face had flushed red, and he had dropped his gaze to the floor. Seto continued to glare at him, willing him to look up, to do something confrontational. He wanted the massage, but he wanted a fight even more. Seto kept staring, and eventually got the first part of his wish. Jounouchi glanced up, peering out from under his eyelashes, checking to see if the elder Kaiba was still looking at him. Then he smiled, slightly—a small, teasing smile—and the bell rang. Jounouchi sat still and waited for the rest of the class to filter out of the room, then smirked and stood himself, leaving Seto to sit, confused and furious.
The mutt had been laughing at him. Laughing. That worthless mangy cur who had somehow deluded himself into thinking he had some sort of right to be so obsessed, so intent, after all this time, and he was laughing? At Seto Kaiba? Impossible. It was ridiculous—Seto was sure there was nothing humorous about his appearance, he hadn't said anything stupid, he wasn't trying to be funny. And yet there it was. There was no other explanation for that smile, that smirk, that ridiculous obsession that just wouldn't go away. What could the mutt possibly be thinking?
And for God's sake, why?